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An important factor when considering implementation of historian software is recognition of differences between plant-floor data and the business environment. 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 analyses. A plant-wide historian provides 10-20 times faster read/write performance over a relational database and 1-millisecond resolution for true real-time 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...