Published: 06 Feb 2018 Last Modified Date: 08 Jul 2022
Question
Some Tableau named connectors, such as Amazon Athena and SAP HANA, use the JDBC standard instead of ODBC. There are two ways to connect using JDBC, Use a TDC file, or Use a PROPERTIES file.
How can users modify JDBC connections and gather driver logs?
Environment
Tableau Desktop
Tableau Server
Amazon Athena
SAP HANA on Mac OS X
Answer
JDBC connection options can be modified through the use of a .properties file. This is a plain text document containing key-value pairs for each connection parameter. However, please note that this file should not be saved in a UTF-8 with BOM character encoding - this encoding adds characters to the beginning of a file and interferes with Tableau applying the customizations.
Each key-value pair should be on its own line with no delimiter - refer to the examples attached to this article. After saving the document as either saphana.properties or athena.properties (as appropriate), place it in the My Tableau Repository/Datasources folder.
To enable a .properties file for Tableau Server, it must be placed on all Server nodes in the following directory:
tabsvc/vizqlserver/Datasources for Windows
/var/opt/tableau/tableau_server/data/tabsvc/vizqlserver/Datasources/ for Linux
If you are using Tableau Prep Conductor, make sure the file is placed in the following directory as well:
ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\flowprocessor\Datasources for Windows
/var/opt/tableau/tableau_server/data/tabsvc/flowprocessor/Datasources/ for Linux
Further connections to that data source type will have the option values included in the query URL.
In addition to the options in the links above, proxy information can be specified using the keys proxy_host and proxy_port, as described in this KB article Unable to Connect to Athena via Proxy Server
Any '\' characters in the athena.properties file, such as in filepaths, must be escaped. Instead of C:\Users\username, you would use C:\\Users\\username.