Assets in Cloud Pak for Data

Cloud Pak for Data and its services provide a platform with collaborative workspaces and tools. You provide the content to the platform, in the form of assets. An asset is an item that contains information about data, other valuable information, or code that works with data.

You add assets by importing them or creating them with tools. You work with assets in collaborative workspaces. The workspace you use depends on your tasks.

Projects Where you collaborate with others to work with data and create assets. Most tools are in projects and you run assets that contain code in projects. For example, you can import data, prepare data, analyze data, or create models in projects. See Projects.

Catalogs Where you store assets to share with your organization or go to find assets that you need to work with. You can copy assets from catalogs into projects, or publish assets from projects into the catalog. You can edit asset properties and metadata in a catalog, but you can't run assets. See Catalogs.

Deployment spaces Where you deploy and run assets that are ready for testing or production. You move assets from projects into deployment spaces and then create deployments from those assets. You monitor and update deployments as necessary. See Deployment spaces.

The following graphic illustrates how you can move assets around the platform.

You can find any asset in any of the workspaces for which you are a collaborator by searching for it from the global search bar. See Searching for assets across the platform.

You can create many different types of assets, but all assets have some common properties:

• Asset types
• Common properties for assets
• Data asset types and their properties

Asset types

To create most types of assets, you must use a specific tool. Most tools are provided by one or more services. The tools to create data assets and connection assets are provided by the platform and do not require any specific services.

To see which services you need for which tools, open the tools and services map.

The following table lists the types of assets that you can create, the tools you need to create them, and the workspaces where you can add them.

Common properties for assets

Assets accumulate information in properties when you create them, use them, or when they are updated by automated processes. Some properties are provided by users and can be edited by users. Other properties are automatically provided by the system. Most system-provided properties can't be edited by users.

Common properties for assets everywhere

Most types of assets have the properties listed in the following table in all the workspaces where those asset types exist.

Common properties for assets in catalogs

In addition to the common properties that all assets have, assets in catalogs have the properties and pages that are listed in the following table.

You can create custom properties for assets. Custom properties are shown in the Details section on the asset's Overview tab in the catalog. See Custom properties and relationships.

To edit asset properties, you must have the required permissions. See Editing assets in a catalog.

Common properties for assets that run in tools

Some assets are associated with running a tool. For example, an AutoAI experiment asset runs in the AutoAI tool. Assets that run in tools are also known as operational assets. Every time you run assets in tools, you start a job. You can monitor and schedule jobs. Jobs use compute resources. Compute resources are measured in capacity unit hours (CUH) and are tracked. Depending on the plans for your services, you can have a limited amount of CUH per month, or pay for the CUH that you use every month.

For many assets that run in tools, you have a choice of the compute environment configuration to use. Typically, larger and faster environment configurations consume compute resources faster.

In addition to basic properties, most assets that run in tools contain the following types of information in projects:

Data asset types and their properties

Data asset types contain metadata and other information about data, including how to access the data.

How you create a data asset depends on where your data is:

• If your data is in a file, you upload the file from your local system to a project, catalog, or deployment space.
• If your data is in a remote data source, you first create a connection asset that defines the connection to that data source. Then you create a data asset by selecting the connection, the path or other structure, and the table or file that contains the data. This type of data asset is called a connected data asset.

The following graphic illustrates how data assets from files point to uploaded files in IBM Cloud and connected data assets require a connection asset and point to data in a remote data source.

You can create the following types of data assets:

Data asset from a file Represents a file that you uploaded from your local system. The file is stored in the object storage container on the IBM Cloud Object Storage instance that is associated with the project, catalog, or deployment space. The contents of the file can include structured data, unstructured textual data, images, and other types of data. You can create a data asset with a file of any format. However, you can do more actions on CSV files than other file type. See Properties of data assets. You can create a data assets from a file by uploading a file in a project, catalog, or deployment space. You can also create data files with tools and convert them to assets. For example, you can create data assets from files with the Data Refinery, Jupyter notebook, and RStudio tools.

Connected data asset Represents a table, file, or folder that is accessed through a connection to a remote data source. The connection is defined in the connection asset that is associated with the connected data asset. You can create a connected data asset for every supported connection. When you access a connected data asset, the data is dynamically retrieved from the data source. See Properties of data assets. You can import connected data assets from a data source with the connected data tool in a project, catalog, or deployment space. If you want to rerun the import on a schedule, use the metadata import tool in projects. You can create virtual tables that compile data from multiple data source with Watson Query in the Data virtualization workspace.

Folder asset Represents a folder in IBM Cloud Object Storage. A folder data asset is special case of a connected data asset. You create a folder data asset by specifying the path to the folder and the IBM Cloud Object Storage connection asset. You can view the files and subfolders that share the path with the folder data asset. The files that you can view within the folder data asset are not themselves data assets. For example, you can create a folder data asset for a path that contains news feeds that are continuously updated. See Properties of data assets. You can import folder assets from IBM Cloud Object Storage with the connected data tool in a project, catalog, or deployment space.

Connection asset Contains the information necessary to create a connection to a data source. See Properties of connection assets. You can create connections with the connection tool in a project, catalog, or deployment space.

Learn more about creating and importing data assets:

• Adding data to a project
• Adding assets to a catalog
• Adding data assets to a deployment space
• Virtualizing data

Properties of data assets from files and connected data assets

In addition to basic properties and common catalog properties, data assets from files and connected data assets have the properties or pages that are listed in the following table.

Properties of connection assets

The properties of connection assets depend on the data source that you select when you create a connection. See Connection types. Connection assets for most data sources have the properties that are listed in the following table.

Learn more

• The value of assets
• Searching for assets across the platform
• Preview
• Profile
• Activities
• Visualizations
• Getting started
• Connection types

Parent topic: Overview of IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service