Download Amazon Athena JDBC Driver

Download the Amazon Athena JDBC driver, copy the JDBC URL into DbSchema, and start designing schemas with ER diagrams — free Community Edition.

About the Amazon Athena JDBC driver

A JDBC driver is a Java .jar library that lets applications connect to Amazon Athena. DbSchema uses JDBC to reverse engineer schemas, run SQL, and generate documentation. Driver files are usually published by the database vendor or an open-source project.

JDBC URL format

Host, port, database name, and SSL options are passed in a URL starting with jdbc:. Each Amazon Athena driver uses its own syntax — see the connection details below.

The Amazon Athena JDBC driver

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive SQL query service that analyzes data stored in Amazon S3 directly using standard SQL. There is no infrastructure to manage — you pay only for the queries you run — making it ideal for ad-hoc data exploration and log analysis at petabyte scale.

The Amazon Athena JDBC URL

• Required File(s): AthenaJDBC42.jar
• Java Driver Class: com.amazon.athena.jdbc.AthenaDriver
• JDBC URL: jdbc:awsathena://AwsRegion=REGION;S3OutputLocation=s3://BUCKET/PREFIX/
• Website: Amazon Athena

We use the Amazon Athena driver.

Download Amazon Athena JDBC Driver

The driver archive is a zip file. Extract it and load the .jar files using DbSchema's Driver Manager.

Set Up the Athena Connection

Athena has no host and no port. It is a query service, so the connection is described by a region, a place to put results, and IAM credentials.

1. Give the AWS region. Queries run in the region you name, and the Glue catalog Athena reads is regional too — the wrong region shows an empty database list rather than an error.
2. Give an S3 output location. Athena writes every result set to S3 before the driver reads it, so a bucket path such as s3://my-bucket/athena-results/ is required. Without one, queries fail even though the connection itself succeeded. A workgroup that already defines an output location supplies this for you.
3. Sign in with IAM credentials. The user field takes the AWS access key id and the password field the secret key. Temporary credentials additionally need a session token.
4. Grant the permissions Athena needs on your behalf. The identity needs Athena query rights, Glue catalog read rights, read access to the S3 data being queried, and write access to the results bucket. Missing the last one is the usual reason a connection opens and then every query fails.
5. Paste the URL into DbSchema. In the Connection Dialog set Connection Mode to Edit the JDBC URL Manually and paste the string you copied. The user and the password are entered in the first tab, not in the URL.

Everything travels over HTTPS to AWS endpoints, so there is no inbound firewall rule to write.

DbSchema and Amazon Athena

DbSchema connects to Amazon Athena using the AWS JDBC driver and renders S3-backed Glue catalog tables and Iceberg tables as visual schemas. Use DbSchema's Query Builder to compose Athena SQL queries with partition pruning and nested data support.