RTA's Blog
Adding SQL to the RTConnect A-B PLC Historian: What It Means for Factory Data
Dec
One of the very interesting new features of the RTConnect A-B PLC Historian is SQL. SQL (Structured Query Language) is a declarative programming language. It makes life easy for those of us who must interact with databases.
If you have followed me for a while, you probably know that I don’t just dislike databases, I hate them. But if I must use a relational database, I want one that supports SQL. SQL provides people like me with a standardized way to manage and manipulate data, allowing operations such as creating and modifying database tables and views, adding new data or updating existing data in tables and retrieving specific information from a database by querying tables.
The reason it is so popular is that almost every relational database supports SQL. Banks use it. NASA uses it. That kind of portability is catnip for developers, including many industrial automation vendors. Whatever data their device generates can be quickly stored in a database using standard, off-the-shelf code.
The RTConnect A-B PLC Historian now supports SQL. That means it is easier than ever to quickly collect data from one or more PLCs, organize that data into database tables and publish that information to an SQL database.
RTConnect A-B PLC Historian applications using SQL include:
- Production Logging – The RTConnect A-B PLC Historian is perfect for logging product data that you want to collect at the end of a shift, every hour, end of day or cyclically. Users can record faults, alarms, machine states, product counts and every other kind of machine data in an SQL database.
- KPI Dashboards – Many users use the RTConnect A-B PLC Historian to collect, normalize and calculate data values. Those records are sent to SQL databases for storage and reporting or immediate visualization.
- Traceability – In some industries, like Food and Pharma, everything needs to be saved. The RTConnect A-B PLC Historian is a great way to locally save data and then, once a day or once a shift, send that data to a database using SQL.
SQL is a key feature of the RTConnect A-B PLC Historian. It vastly expands the number of applications and assists users with solving many of their factory floor problems.
