Abstract

Many companies want to approach a manufacturing data archive in the same way they approach an enterprise archive – with a traditional relational database. However, a relational database is rarely the best approach for the manufacturing floor for many reasons. First, manufacturing operates in real time requiring very fast data collection for optimal analysis purposes. A plant-wide historian provides 10-20 times faster read/write performance over a relational database and 1-millisecond resolution for true realtime data. Additionally, the plant-wide historian is optimized for “time series” data – while a relational database is built to manage relationships. For example, relational databases are great at answering a question such as: What customer ordered the largest shipment? A plant-wide historian, on the other hand, excels at answering questions that manufacturing typically needs to address to make a real difference in production, such as: What was today’s hourly unit production standard deviation?