Accessing data sources with the Flight service

Flight service provides read and write access to various data sources through a common API, without you having to deal with database drivers that are specific to the type of the data source. Flight service provides a single interface for working with many different data sources.

Required services

Flight service is available only if the common core services are installed. The common core services are not installed separately. Common core services are automatically installed if you install a service that has a dependency on them.

Components

The Flight API in Cloud Pak for Data is based on the following components:

The Flight client API from the open-source Arrow Flight framework.
- For more information, see the Apache Arrow documentation and Arrow Flight RPC.
- For Python, see Flight client for Python.
- For R, see Connecting to Flight RPC Servers.
The location and authentication method for the Flight server in Cloud Pak for Data. Applications don't need to retrieve credentials from a connection asset and submit them to a database driver. Flight service automatically retrieves credentials transparently.
Data requests that you can use to specify which files or tables you want to access. See Flight data requests.
The itc_utils library, which simplifies reading data with the Flight client. For examples, see Examples of Flight service with itc_utils and pandas.

Services and tools

You can use the Flight service APIs with these services that accept custom Python or R code:

Analytics Engine powered by Apache Spark
Watson Studio
Watson Machine Learning
Watson Machine Learning Accelerator
Data Product Hub
watsonx.data

Learn more

Parent topic: Adding data to a project