Software Toolbox Technical Blog

When it comes to Earth Day, conversations often center on renewable energy and reducing raw materials—but true sustainability goes far beyond solar panels and recycling bins. One of the most overlooked yet powerful ways to shrink our environmental footprint is by reclaiming something we already have in abundance: waste heat.  

In this second installment of our 2025 Environmental Sustainability blog series, we’re diving into the surprisingly diverse world of heat reclamation—where compost piles, underground aquifers, industrial processes, and even your HVAC system can all become unexpected sources of clean, efficient energy.  

Curious about how this is so? Read on to discover the technologies that turn excess heat into big savings—for both the planet and your wallet.

Welcome to the kickoff post of our Data Storage Deep Dive blog series! In this series, we will explore the crucial role of data storage solutions and Historians in industrial automation. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking into how solutions delivered by Software Toolbox can be utilized with Historians, helping you make the most of your industrial data.

When logging data to a database or text file, the way that data is presented is essential due to the implications it has for who, or what, is reading this data to make decisions. Without the correct configuration of the data’s timestamps, records can easily become misinterpreted or sorted in non-chronological order by further systems. It’s critical that your data logging solution provides flexibility to get your data when you want it, how you want it, and stored the way you want it. Providing full control of the timestamp format for many users is not just a feature of our OPC Data Logger, but a requirement based on other connected systems and standards. Customizable Time Formats is the focus of today’s blog, but it is just one of the OPC Data Logger’s many flexible features that have our fans raving over it.

What is the most important feature for any data logger to have? At the end of the day, we are trusting a data logger to take our data and store it.  Now whether that is for reporting, optimization, legal reasons, or simply to retain process data over some period of time in case it might be needed later, we expect the data to be logged without any losses.

This is particularly true in the industrial automation space, where the amount of data that is being logged is growing almost as exponentially as the speed at which the data is needed in order to have a business impact. As such, the prospect of losing data can very quickly result in lost jobs, thousands of dollars in lost production, and legal or financial penalties in case of an audit.

So how much do you trust your data logger to really be logging 100% of the data that it should be? In this blog post, I will address these concerns and highlight the ways OPC UA provides capabilities that software applications can leverage to provide peace of mind.

Does your data logging software force you to define the location where you're logging your data ahead of time?  Wouldn’t it be nice if your logging software could evaluate your data and make a decision on where the data should be logged?

In this first of two posts in a series on dynamic SQL logging, I'll show you how the OPC Data Logger can easily be configured to switch between SQL Tables at runtime, reducing any post-log sorting you have to do in SQL and saving you time and effort in the process.

Do you need to log specific process data to a database or text file based on some predefined variable or condition? We typically refer to this concept as "conditional" or "condition-based" logging.  It sounds simple enough but without a plan, it can be a tricky task to implement.

In this post, I'll introduce you to the considerations involved with conditional data logging and cover how OPC Data Logger can easily be set up to log data based on a variety of conditions without a lot of headaches.