Data store connectors

With data store connectors, you can connect your IoT tool organization to IBM® services that provide both long and short-term storage solutions.

Setting up a new connection is a four-step process:

  1. Create a service bindings that provides the IoT tool with the necessary information to connect to the external service.
  2. Create a connector instance for the service binding.
  3. Configure one or more destinations on the connector.
  4. Set up one or more forwarding rules for each destination.

Service bindings

Service bindings create the connection between the IoT tool and the external service.

When you set up an IoT tool service binding, you specify the type of service you are binding to and provide the necessary credentials to connect to the service.

Note: Service bindings are supported for the following services only:

For more information about how to manage service bindings, see Data store connectors API in your local API documentation. For more information about accessing the local documentation, see APIs.

Connectors

When you have bound a service to the IoT tool, you must also create a connector for the data store connector components.

The following restrictions apply:

  • Depending on your service plan, up to 10 connectors can be created.

For more information about how to manage connectors, see Data store connectors API in your local API documentation. For more information about accessing the local documentation, see APIs.

Destinations

Destinations specify where on the destination service the IoT data is written and vary depending on the bound service.

The following restrictions apply:

  • Each connector can have multiple destinations. Depending on your subscription plan, you can define up to 100 destinations.
Note: Destinations are immutable. To change the destination of your IoT event data, you must complete the following steps:
  1. Create a new destination.
  2. Update the forwarding rule to reference the new destination.
  3. Delete the old destination.

For more information about how to manage destinations, see Data store connectors API in your local API documentation. For more information about accessing the local documentation, see APIs.

Forwarding rules

Forwarding rules configure the kind of data and the scope of the data that is sent to a destination. Data store connectors support the forwarding of both events and state.

The following restrictions apply:

  • Each connector can have multiple forwarding rules. Depending on your service plan, up to 100 rules can be created.
  • Each forwarding rule can route to a single destination only, but multiple rules can reference the same destination.

Tip: Even though multiple rules can be used to forward both state and events to the same destination, forwarding a mix of state and events to the same destination generally makes it harder to develop applications with mixed-type destinations as a data source.

For more information about how to manage forwarding rules, see Data store connectors API in your local API documentation. For more information about accessing the local documentation, see APIs.