A project is a basic organizational unit of MaxCompute. A project in MaxCompute is similar to a database or schema in a traditional database management system. Projects are used to isolate users and manage access requests. A project contains multiple objects, such as tables, resources, functions, and instances. You can create tables, upload data, develop jobs, and allocate different computing resources based on your business requirements in a project.
MaxCompute supports the Schema (three layer model). A Project is similar to a Catalog in data lake engines or a Database in databases. A Schema is similar to a Database under a Catalog or a Schema under a database instance. For more information about Schema, see Schema-related operations.
MaxCompute facilitates project operation and management.
After you activate the MaxCompute service, you must create projects before you use MaxCompute. For more information about how to create a MaxCompute project, see Create a MaxCompute project.
After you create a MaxCompute project, you must go to the project to perform subsequent operations, such as development, analysis, and O&M. For more information, see Project operations.
MaxCompute provides project data protection to ensure data security. For more information, see Security operations.
MaxCompute provides cross-project resource access.
You can have permissions to manage multiple projects. You can access objects of another project from your project after security authorization. For more information, see Cross-project resource access based on packages.
If you use DataWorks to create a MaxCompute project, you must create a DataWorks workspace first. For more information, see Basic mode and standard mode. The name of the DataWorks workspace may be different from the name of the associated MaxCompute project. You must specify the project name when you develop data.
MaxCompute supports external projects, which are a special type of projects.
External projects cannot be separately created and used. You must use external projects with the Lake and Warehouse Integration (Data Lakehouse) page in the DataWorks console if you want to access and manage table data in Hive databases of Hadoop clusters or table data in Data Lake Formation (DLF). For more information, see Lakehouse of MaxCompute.
You cannot use external projects to run jobs. You must associate external projects with MaxCompute projects and use <external_project_name>.<table_name> to access table data in the external projects. For more information, see Use SQL statements to manage an external project.
External projects are provided free of charge. The computing resources consumed for queries are billed on MaxCompute projects with which external projects are associated.
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If you want to limit and manage the resource usage of a project to prevent a single user or project from consuming excessive resources and affecting the stability of the entire system, you can specify a reasonable quota. For more information, see Quota.