Accessing data

With IBM Cloud Pak for Data, you can connect to the different data sources in your enterprise so that everyone can find the data that they need quickly and easily. The way that you connect to your data depends on several factors, including the services that are installed on Cloud Pak for Data. Some services can use connections that are defined at the platform-level, while other services use connections that are specific to the service.

Supported data sources

You can connect to your data sources in several ways.

• Connecting to data sources at the platform-level
• Connecting to data sources at the service-level

Connecting to data sources at the platform level means that you can create connections that can be used by various services across the platform. Any user who has access to the platform can see these connections. However, only users with the credentials for the data source can use a connection.

Connecting to data sources at the service-level means that the connection is accessible only from the service where it is created. Within Cloud Pak for Data, you can use the following sources to work with your data.

• IBM Cognos Dashboards
• Data Refinery
• DataStage
• SPSS Modeler
• Watson Knowledge Catalog
• Watson Query
• Watson Studio

For more information on connecting to data sources, see Supported data sources.

Accessing data

To make Cloud Pak for Data work for you, you need access to data. Planning involves confirming that the data source is supported in the services and tools that you want to use, authentication requirements, security, and more.

You can host your data on Cloud Pak for Data by using one of the multiple databases that are available with the data source services, or you can create a connection to an external data source.

• Using a data source service on Cloud Pak for Data: Deploy a database in the cluster with one of the data source services.
• Connecting to data outside of Cloud Pak for Data: Access your data where it already resides. You can create a connection to cloud or on-premises data.

For more information, see Planning to access data.

Integrating and preparing data

You can use Cloud Pak for Data to integrate data across multiple clouds to refine data, transform data, virtualize data, manage primary data, and privatize data. Various services allow you to:

• Refine data
• Curate data for quality
• Manage data quality
• Transform data
• Virtualize data
• Manage primary data
• Mask data
• Replicate data

For more information, see Integrating and preparing data.

Summary

In this section, you got a brief overview of working with data in Cloud Pak for Data. For more detailed information, see Accessing data.