Connect to your Data Storage

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Essentia defines a resource that contains data as a ‘datastore’. Current datastore types that are supported by Essentia include:

  • a local disk drive
  • an AWS S3 store (cloud based storage)
  • and an Azure Blob store

To register the local datastore with Essentia you would enter the command:

$ ess select local

For an AWS S3 bucket you would enter:

$ ess select s3://bucket_name --credentials=~/your_credential_file.csv

The credentials flag can be replaced with aws_access_key and aws_secret_access_key to directly enter credentials:

$ ess select s3://bucket_name --aws_access_key=your_access_key --aws_secret_access_key=your_secret_access_key

However, we recommend the use of credential files if possible. To create a credential file, simply save your access and secret access keys in the following format to a csv file with a name of your choice:

User Name,Access Key Id,Secret Access Key
your_user_name,your_access_key,your_secret_access_key

For an Azure Blob datastore you would enter:

$ ess select blob://private_container --account_name=associated_account --account_key=associated_key

for a private container or

$ ess select blob://public_container --account_name=associated_account

for a public container.

Public Data

The rest of the tutorials work on your local datastore and on data pulled from a public Github Repository that we provide.

We also provide a public bucket on AWS S3 and container on Azure Blob that contain data you can play with after you finish our tutorials. To select these public datastores, the commands are:

$ ess select s3://asi-public --credentials=~/mycredentials.csv

for AWS, and

$ ess select blob://asi-public --account_name=asipublic

for Azure.