watsonx.data Lite plan

Before you begin

To provision watsonx.data Lite plan instance, you must have a trial account (or a paid account) on the IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud trial accounts can have only one resource group. To create an IBM Cloud trial account, see Trial account.

Provisioning watsonx.data Lite plan

To provision a Lite plan instance, see Provisioning watsonx.data Lite plan.

Viewing usage

You can monitor the Resource Units usage level.

1. For the Lite plan, in the watsonx.data UI, Billing section, you can view a widget that displays the Resource Unit consumption.

2. If the allocated Resource Units or time runs out, your Lite instance will be suspended. You can still launch the IBM Cloud instance however, cannot use it. You can manually delete your IBM Cloud Lite instance by following the steps:

   1. Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
   2. Click Resource list. The list of resources appears.
   3. In Resource list, expand Databases.
   4. To delete an instance, click the overflow menu icon at the end of the row and click Delete. A delete confirmation dialog is displayed.
   5. Click Delete.

   For more information to manually delete an instance, see Deleting instance.

Getting started with watsonx.data

The Lite plan usage consumption starts when you complete quickstart. The resource units (RU) are consumed even when the watsonx.data instance is not being used. However, RU consumption reduces if you pause or delete the engine. Therefore, pause the engines and services when not in use, to maximize the IBM Cloud Lite plan availability.

To simplify the steps, when you log in to the watsonx.data web console for the first time, you are directly presented with the quick start wizard Summary page.

1. In the Summary page, review the configurations before you finish setting up your data infrastructure.

   You can also navigate to the previous pages by using the Back button and edit the details. For more information, see Quick start watsonx.data console.

2. Click Finish and go. This displays the Infrastructure manager page.

3. In the Infrastructure manager page, you can view the engine (Presto (Java)), and already provisioned bucket and catalogs. You can add single Starter sized Milvus service, small sized Spark engine, additional buckets and catalogs from the Add Components list.

You cannot scale the existing engine or service or add a new engine (or service). To add a new engine or service, you must delete the existing engine or service.

You can add only one Presto (Java) engine, Spark engine (single node, small size - 8 vCPU, 32GB node) and Milvus service (Milvus with size specification, Starter - 1 Million vectors, Index Parameters - 64, Segment size (1024)). To understand the restrictions, see Lite plan features and restrictions.

Adding your storage and querying data

For more information about how to add a storage that you own and explore how the watsonx.data service interacts with the data you bring in, see Adding your storage and querying data

Saving data from a lite plan to an enterprise plan

When the allocated Resource Units or time expires, the instance becomes inactive and you can no longer access it.

If you choose to continue using watsonx.data by creating an Enterprise watsonx.data instance, you can save the data from your lite plan to the enterprise plan. To do that, you need an IBM Cloud Object Store (COS) bucket to connect to your lite plan instance of watsonx.data. You can then write data to that COS bucket you own. Then, create an enterprise instance of watsonx.data, connect it to the same COS bucket that you own to keep working with the same data files.

1. Create a COS bucket to store data from the Lite plan. For more information, see Create buckets to store data.

2. Ingest data from Lite plan instance to the COS bucket. For more information, see Adding the storage that you own and ingesting data.

3. Either before or after your lite plan has concluded, create an enterprise plan instance. For more information, see Enterprise plan.

4. Go to the Quick start watsonx.data console > Configure bucket page, specify the COS bucket details that you own (which stores data from the Lite plan). For more information, see Quick start watsonx.data console.

When the setup is complete, the watsonx.data home page (enterprise plan) opens. From the navigation menu, select Data manager to view the COS storage bucket with data from the lite plan.