Topic 1.1.1 – Overview

Wonderware Historian is a powerful, high-performance data historian. It can store huge volumes of data generated by modern industrial facilities. Historian can move large amounts of data fast. And it retrieves your data for storage and delivers it to you for process analysis when you need it.

  • About Historian Server

  • The Wonderware Historian Server bridges the gap between a real-time, high-volume plant monitoring and control environment and an open, flexible business information environment.
  • Historian Server, which contains an embedded Microsoft SQL Server, acquires plant data from high-speed Wonderware DA Servers, I/O Servers, InTouch HMI software, and Wonderware Application Server.
  • It compresses and stores the data, and then responds to SQL requests for the plant data. Historian Server also contains event, summary, configuration, security, backup, and system monitoring information. Historian is tightly coupled to Microsoft SQL Server.

Relational Databases

In a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), information is stored in multiple tables
that are related, or linked, together. Storing and accessing information in these multiple tables is
far faster than if all of the information were stored in a single large table. Microsoft SQL Server is a
RDBMS.

Limitations of Relational Databases


A typical relational database is not a viable solution for storing plant data because of the following
limitations:

  • It cannot handle the volume of data produced by plants
  • cannot handle the rapid storage rate of plant data
  • SQL does not effectively handle time-series data

Historian Server as a Real-Time Relational Database


As a real-time relational database, Historian Server is an extension to Microsoft SQL Server,
providing more than an order of magnitude increase in acquisition speeds, a corresponding
reduction in storage volume, and elegant extensions to structured query language (SQL) for
querying time-series data.


Integration with Microsoft SQL Server


A large amount of time-series data has the same characteristics as normal business data. For
example, configuration data is relatively static or does not change at a real-time rate. Over the life
of a site, tags are added and deleted, descriptions are changed, and engineering ranges are
altered. A Microsoft SQL Server database, called the Runtime database, stores this type of
information.
The Runtime database is the SQL Server online database for the entire Historian Server. The
Runtime database is shipped with all of the database entities, such as tables, views, and stored
procedures that are necessary to store the configuration data for a typical factory. You can use the
Configuration Editor within the System Management Console to easily add configuration data to
the Runtime database that reflects your factory environment.
Microsoft SQL Server Object Linking and Embedding for Databases (OLE DB) is used to access
the time-series data that the historian stores outside of the SQL Server database. You can query
the Microsoft SQL Server for both configuration information in the Runtime database and historical
data on disk, and the integration appears seamless.
Because the historian is tightly coupled to and effectively extends a Microsoft SQL Server, it can
leverage all of the features that Microsoft SQL Server has to offer, such as database security,
replication, and backups.

Support for SQL Clients


Historian Server client/server architecture supports client applications on the desktop, while
ensuring the integrity and security of the data on the server. This client/server architecture
provides common access to plant and process data: real-time and historical data, associated
configuration, event, and business data.
The computing power of both the client and the server are exploited by optimizing processor
intensive operations on the server and minimizing data to be transmitted on the network to
improve system performance.
The gateway for accessing any type of information in Historian Server is through Microsoft SQL
Server. Thus, any client application that can connect to Microsoft SQL Server can connect to
Historian Server.

Last modified: Thursday, 14 May 2020, 5:45 PM