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.

You can make more confident and informed decisions when you have accurate and relevant data to base those decisions on. Operational data is crucial because it enables you to track performance, quickly identify issues, and make decisions based on up-to-date information, resulting in enhanced efficiency and effectiveness.

With the Industry 4.0 hot topics of AI, Big Data, IoT, and countless others, many of the long-standing technologies that power many industries are left out of the limelight. For many users, OPC and SQL databases are well known and have been the basis for many simplified data collection projects for years. For others, there are still new and growing requirements to digitize data and interconnect a variety of sources into an easily accessible and manageable location. With Software Toolbox’s large variety of solutions we help both big and small companies alike meet their needs.

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.

Applications tend to have a lot of moving parts. Here at Software Toolbox, we know that understanding these parts is important whether you are new to an application or a seasoned veteran who wants a more robust understanding for the sake of troubleshooting and optimization. Because of this, part of our job is to help you recognize and understand the components of our products to maximize your ROI when using our solutions.

In this blog post, we'll provide an overview of the different components of OPC Data Logger, an effective solution for reliable, event-driven logging of data from OPC server data sources (both OPC UA and OPC DA) to SQL and ODBC databases (including Microsoft Azure SQL) or text and CSV files. We'll cover the wizard-based interface used for Configuration, the difference between the Service and Runtime, and the Notification functionality so you can understand the purpose of each component and how to configure them to meet your logging needs.

Storing process data almost always comes with varying project requirements, making it difficult for users to find solutions that cater to specific configuration needs. Luckily, the wide variety of configurable functionality in OPC Data Logger allows for creating unique projects to fit your needs.

If you’re an existing user of OPC Data Logger or in the market for an OPC logging solution, you likely agree that having a reliable and accurate record of your data is a top priority. One of the most valuable parts of investing in a data logging solution is being able to trust that all the data from your sources is captured. But what happens if you lose the connection to your database? What happens to the incoming data during that downtime? Software Toolbox offers several solutions for logging data and today we will focus on OPC Data Logger and its database logging capabilities. 

If you've been following our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we've been covering key Software Toolbox solutions and the specifics of configuring OPC UA security and connectivity.

In this seventh post of the series, we will focus on OPC Data Logger, specifically stepping through settings related to security, endpoints and certificate management and connecting OPC Data Logger to OPC UA servers for logging data.