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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Riak
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Riak is a NoSQL database from Basho Technologies in Bellevue, Washington.
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.
Highly available: If nodes go offline for any reason, the system still operates.
Highly scalable: There is a minimum of 5 nodes, which can handle a lot by themselves. When scaling is required, it can be done easily, with minimal to no downtime on large scales.
Very fast searching: Riak has SOLR indexing built-into the core product, which makes querying for data very fast.
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
Deletes!!! We've seen on numerous occasions where Riak has "resurrected" deleted data. We've worked with Basho numerous times and tried multiple changes to the way we interact with Riak to prevent the problem but it still remains. The deletes seem to reappear weeks, even months, after the delete was issued. We've had to work around this issue by providing a "deleted" flag for all data objects stored in Riak. Thus, we do no delete but simply flip the flag. Excess baggage we would really like to not have to worry about.
Search. Currently there's no way to tell what data you have in Riak without already knowing a particular bucket/key. There is a way to list the keys for a given bucket but due to performance implications, this is not a viable method to lookup data. Especially when you have a large amount of keys in the bucket.
Right now, I'm on a project where we need databases that can run on embedded systems. Riak isn't necessarily the best fit for that scenario. But when we need a clustered database, that's where we'd start considering Riak.
Despite Basho going bankrupt and the project becoming fully open-source, community support is reasonably good, albeit a little slow at times. Paid enterprise-grade support is also available from former Basho engineers but the same company also contributes to the community support for free for basic questions or specific knowledge areas.
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.
Because of the RESTful HTTP interface, the consistency model, and because of the catalog-driven data model, Riak was an easy win over Redis and Memcached.
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
Riak has been a key part of our company's build process for our client's search backend. It is valuable for is in that it provides a reliable way to view the current search index.
