Accessing Just the Required Data from Logs or Archives

In many applications there is lots of data that is collected and archived. In real-time controls domain this is the sampling of various sensor and actuator measurements that are collected over time and archived for reporting and analysis purposes. The data is typically stored in a compressed proprietary format to allow large amounts of data to be quickly captured and stored. In financial markets domains the performance of various instruments like stock prices and mutual fund prices are stored over time. This could also be data collected during flights that results in many Gigabytes worth of data for each test flight.

The commonality in all these industries is that lots of data is collected and stored in an efficient format and in many cases the users want to access only a sub-set of that data in an ad-hoc manner. One option is to extract and load this data into formats such as relational data store such that analysis tools like Excel or reporting tools like Crystal Reports can access it. But this is not very efficient or practical, as it requires manual transfer Aof selected data and massaging of that data to allow consumption by each user. A better approach is to provide real-time access to the sub-set of data requested through a custom ODBC/JDBC driver. In this architecture the data is left in its native format and exposed through ODBC or JDBC driver that implements SQL processing over the data store.

OpenAccess SDK allows the data to stay in its native form and be presented as relational tables accessible using SQL. Desktop tools and users then formulate a SQL query to request the sub-set of data they are interested in. This request is processed by OpenAccess using an adapter that is written to plug the data source into the OpenAccess SQL engine. The adapter (we refer to it as the Interface Provider) works closely with the SQL engine to efficiently access just the required data. Many SCADA vendors including ABB Automation, Honeywell, National Instruments, Emerson Process and QEI have used OpenAccess to allow the users of these systems to access archived and real-time data they manage as if it was stored in a SQL database like SQL Server or Oracle.