Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Industrial teams often find that valuable information lives in more than one place. You can make better decisions when you have access to both live and historical data in one place. Real-time values from PLCs and sensors are essential for monitoring, but SQL databases often hold equally important information, like productions records, quality results, or business transactions. Without a way to easily and quickly connect these sources, teams may spend extra time running manual queries or waiting on reports, slowing down decision making.

Why it matters

Without connecting live and historical sources, operators and engineers are forced to piece together information from separate systems, which slows response time and increases the risk of errors. When SQL data like production orders, quality checks, or inventory status is available side-by-side with live sensor and PLC values, teams gain the full context they need to make decisions faster and with greater confidence.

An often important task when logging important process data to a database or even to the cloud is verification that the data has been logged. This ensures that data has been successfully logged and will not be lost when overwritten in the downstream process.

In this video blog, we'll step through the configuration required in the OPC Data Logger for logging important process data to a database on condition related to a monitored item and how to perform a writeback to the OPC data source confirming the data has been successfully logged.

With the advent of cloud-based solutions in every industry, it's only natural that you might need to migrate from a traditional locally-hosted SQL database for logging your process data to Azure. Fortunately, logging both to traditional SQL and Azure SQL are similar in many ways and OPC Data Logger makes it possible to log to both for OPC UA and DA data sources.

In this video blog, we'll review the basic setup and architecture for OPC Data Logger and then step through the configuration required for logging to SQL and Azure SQL from an OPC server.

Access to various industrial data via RESTful web services is increasingly becoming necessary in this era of inter-connectivity and big data. From sources such as devices with self-hosted web services to relevant market data such as weather information and pricing for commodities and energy, there is a host of relevant data to be integrated from such RESTful web services.

In this video training blog post, we will cover step-by-step how to easily connect to and consume data from RESTful web services and then push that data to OPC and SQL systems with the OPC Router.

Having ready access to the wide array of industrial data available in an enterprise is increasingly important these days, for a variety of reasons.  With ever-expanding applications for using "big data" towards efficiency initiatives such as digital twins, predictive analytics and predictive maintenance, having the ability to bring all of your industrial data together is essential.

In order to analyze that data, however, the upstream systems performing that analysis need access to the actual data - data that is typically widely dispersed geographically and even departmentally within locations.  One interface that is relatively common for such systems is the ability to act as an HTTP (or REST) client.

This blog post will provide an overview of an easy and secure way to share industrial process data available common OPC UA, OPC DA and SQL database sources with big data and other systems that can act as an HTTP / REST Client using the OPC Router. You'll also have a chance to download our free guide with step-by-step instructions.

At Software Toolbox, we commonly hear from users seeking a solution for connecting and gathering data from this or that type of hardware.  Beyond that, though, is what users do with the data once they have it.  A common need is reliably logging process to a database such as Microsoft SQL server.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss a specific use case of a German R&D firm needing to collect data from multiple OPC data sources and log that data to a SQL database for further analysis geared towards a pilot project developing a model for optimizing Combined Heat & Power Partnership (CHP) technology for transferability to many enterprises where heat and power generation are essential to the process.

With the relatively recent availability of OPC UA server capabilities in Siemens S7-1500 PLCs, access to live production data is now open to third-party applications. As a result, those applications can now communicate with hardware that was formerly locked behind proprietary communication drivers.

The OPC Data Logger's OPC UA client interface allows users to quickly and easily connect to S7-1500 PLC’s and log data to their preferred data storage option without the need for intermediate applications. This blog post covers the high-level steps involved with logging data from an S7-1500 controller and you can then download the free hands-on guide with detailed steps.

OmniServer Wedges are included with OmniServer Professional Edition.  Wedges are built-in components providing additional useful capabilities that expand the functionality of OmniServer beyond its core connectivity and data parsing abilities for non-standard devices.

The OmniServer Database Wedge allows you to log your device data to any ODBC-compliant database, including SQL, with a highly configurable format and flexible conditions.  And this ability is built into OmniServer, eliminating the need for separate external components or applications.

In this video blog, I'll show you how to get started using the OmniServer Database Wedge to easily log process data based on specified conditions, making it possible to monitor trends in your process and easily report on your process data or troubleshoot any issues that are discovered.