AVEVA Historian, formerly from Wonderware, is a time-series optimized data store, allowing the user to capture and store high-fidelity industrial big data, to unlock trapped potential for operational improvements.
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Visual FoxPro (Discontinued)
Score 5.5 out of 10
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FoxPro is a programming language and DBMS formerly supported by Microsoft, now at its End of Life.
Paired with Citect SCADA or System Platform, this is an excellent process historian. It also works well collecting OPC data. For basic data storage, retrieval, and analysis, this is well suited. This is not well suited for very large deployments. Multiple instances would need to be used to scale up, and the data fed into a second-tier/enterprise historian for corporate user consumption.
Legacy applications already on VFP are a good candidate. If you plan to move to iOS and Android apps, VFP is not for you. Also, in future access to VFP programmers may be limited. You could use VFP as a powerful database tool. I know of many programmers who love to exploit the features of VFP to create easy to use applications.
Query performance--for very long-term/large queries; the latest version which we are yet to commission has some improvements in this area
User interface--the trend, query, and Excel add-ins are basic and could do with a refresh; web-based clients are a paid add-on and less full featured, so not a true replacement
Connectivity--Wonderware System Platform driver packs are required for additional data source types, where native connectors are not provided by other products
Although MS has discontinued support of VFP there is a good community of programmers that are available for help. In fact we have several programmers at Apptread that are skilled not only in VFP but also .NET so that if there is a need to migrate some parts of applications to .NET , it is easy for us to do that.
AVEVA Historian, formerly Wonderware, was the best of the process tier historians in terms of reliability and functionality. It is still under development and not a "dead" product. It is also more cost effective than the more full-featured enterprise historians, such as PI, which our organization is not yet ready for. The feature set is at the right cost level, coupled with current support, were the key factors in the decision.
We are only using FoxPro because it is the only way to add custom plugins into the software we use to manage our stock. FoxPro is a semi-oriented object language and should clearly not be compared with recent technologies.
Increased efficiency, reduction in labour for preparing reports--data is available to be queried and reported with less effort
Increased production efficiency--near real-time data availability and comparisons to historical data has been used to make faster and better operational decisions
Increased reliability--data has been used for maintenance optimization and planning purposes
