CData Integration

Diffbot Connector for CData Technical Documentation

Overview

Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph Connector for CData enables SQL-based access to Diffbot's Knowledge Graph. Pull organizations, people, articles, and places into Tableau, PowerBI, DBeaver, and other JDBC compatible tools. No CSV downloads, no manual imports, no data cleaning required.

The connector is packaged as a CData API Profile (.apip file) and runs through CData's API Driver. It exposes five tables: Account, Organization, Person, Article, and Place. Filtering happens through Diffbot Query Language (DQL) passed into the SQL WHERE clause.

What You Need

CData API Driver for JDBC (cdata.com/apidriver/download)

Diffbot API token (free token at diffbot.com)

The diffbot-api-profile.apip file (download the latest release from github.com/jerodj-cdata/diffbot-api-profile/releases)

Any JDBC-compatible SQL client (DBeaver, DataGrip, Tableau, PowerBI, Looker, Snowflake, Databricks).

Setup

Install the CData API Driver for JDBC and note the install location. The driver JAR will be at:

Windows: C:\Program Files\CData\CData JDBC Driver for API 2025\lib\cdata.jdbc.api.jar

macOS: /Applications/CData JDBC Driver for API 2025/lib/cdata.jdbc.api.jar

Linux: /opt/cdata/jdbcdriver/lib/cdata.jdbc.api.jar

Create a new user driver in your SQL client and add the cdata.jdbc.api.jar and cdata.jdbc.api.lic files. If the .lic file isn't in your lib directory, generate one by running java -jar cdata.jdbc.api.jar -license and entering TRIAL when prompted.

Download the latest diffbot-api-profile release from GitHub and save the .apip file somewhere permanent. You'll reference this path in your connection string.

Connection

Create a new data source in your SQL client using the CData API Driver.

Set authentication to None and use this connection URL: jdbc:api:Profile=/<path>/diffbot-api-profile;ProfileSettings="APIToken=<your-token>";AuthScheme=None;

Replace <path> with the directory holding the .apip file and <your-token> with your Diffbot API token. Do not include the .apip extension in the URL.

Test the connection by running SELECT * FROM Account. If the query returns your token info, you're good to go.

Limitations

The connector is read-only. SELECT only, no INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. It's in beta, so behavior may shift in future versions. During the beta, queries return a maximum of 25 records. If you need higher volume, email [email protected] to unlock larger result sets.

Resources

Knowledge Graph overview: https://docs.diffbot.com/docs/getting-started-with-diffbot-knowledge-graph

DQL reference: http://docs.diffbot.com/reference/introduction-to-search-dql

CData API Driver: https://www.cdata.com/apidriver/

Connector repo: http://github.com/jerodj-cdata/diffbot-api-profile

Support: [email protected]