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Old subject, combined with new tools: What would be the best/appropriate way to query data for a web application from an AspenTech IP21 (InfoPlus.21) data historian?

In the past, I've used some pretty awful queries via the Aspen SqlPlus ODBC driver, but that doesn't seem like the right approach, as it doesn't seem to install on Win 7 at all.

Anyone here have experience with that?

reallyJim
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2 Answers2

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1) make sure you have appropriate version of Aspen tools, later ones (7.1, 7.2) will run on Windows 7 with no problems

2) I have worked with Aspen IP21 going over 15 years and have never had issues with SQL performance compared to other databases like Oracle or SQL server as long as the IP21 is on an approriate server and the query is written appropriately per the structure of the database. Doing a join against timestamp is going to produce a slow query. Depending on what you want to accomplish, there are multiple other ways to get data, through HISTORY pseudo table, AGGREGATES table, or other query techniques that are specific to IP21.

3) ODBC is still the most standard, easiest, and to me best performance for getting data from Ip21 form any client, ASP, .Net, web page, other databases, VB programs, Excel VBA, etc. Just may need some optimization tweaking probably in how SQL is written.

Chris Friedman
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  • What I work(ed) with is needing to report on Out Of Spec events, that is, I have some baseline values that the process value must stay between. It's also dependent on another value being in a particular state (say a bit being "on" indicating that a process is running) to ensure that the only data I look at is the "running" data. In the past, I've had to use the timestamp to compare those two values (process and run), as it's the only commonality between them. Is there a better approach? – reallyJim Mar 18 '11 at 14:50
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    are there any command line tools or scripts to query ip21 and save the results as csv? – Jeff Tsui Nov 11 '14 at 04:32
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I've had extensive experience using the normal SQLPlus drivers in C#/ASP.NET and performance has never been an issue. While the ODBC drivers work, I have encountered certain limitations, such as not always returning SELECTs results.

As for how to check 'out of spec': If this is for real-time values and not for ranges of time, I would suggest using record references to simply select the current value. That way the entire query stays in memory.

For time ranges you will have to select the ranges and iterate over them, which is more costly.

Elipson
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  • can you point me to the documentation for "normal SQLPlus drivers in C#". Need to grab some historical tag data from IP21. Thanks. – vdidxho Mar 11 '20 at 16:07
  • Hi. If you have the SQLPlus studio installed, the help file has quite a bit of information on both SQLPlus and .NET implemtations. HISTORY and AGGREGATES will be the simplest place for you to extract historical - Make sure to add time restrictions in your WHERE clause :) Let me know if you have additional questions - I'm sure I can help. – Elipson Mar 12 '20 at 09:51
  • Great, that sounds helpful. I assume "SQLPlus studio" is the product I need to acquire from aspentech? I wish there was a way to contact you directly... It looks like we'll need to make a purchase in order to continue moving forward. – vdidxho Mar 25 '20 at 14:15