Historians: Overview

What Does This Article Cover?

How process historians relate to HighByte Intelligence Hub
Which Intelligence Hub Connections are used with common historians
Typical design patterns you'll see in historian-related solutions
Where starter solutions help - and where they do not.

Historians and Intelligence Hub

A process data historian is a specialized database that collects, stores, and retrieves time-series data from industrial systems and equipment (sensors, PLCs, SCADA, DCS). It is commonly used in food & beverage, energy, utilities, and other process industries.
Time-series data is a sequence of data points over time, where each point is time-stamped.

How the Intelligence Hub is used with historians

Intelligence Hub is often used to obtain data from a historian, curate a use-case-aligned payload, and send it to a destination system.
The payload may include last values, historical time-series, and/or metadata. Data from the historian can be combined with other sources to create a composite payload.

Destinations & design considerations

Destination systems may contain structured or unstructured data and may be file-based or table-based.
When designing a pipeline, it can be important to optimize data resolution, latency, and compute costs. There are multiple design considerations and solution patterns.

Intelligence Hub Connections for common historians

HighByte customers have created data pipelines to exchange data with the following historians. An Intelligence Hub Connections enables data to be exchanged with a historian.

Historian	Intelligence Hub Connection	Notes
AVEVA PI System Data Archive	PI System Connection	Uses a Windows agent that can run as a service; secured socket to the Hub.
AVEVA PI System Asset Framework	PI System Connection	Same agent as above; communicates via AF SDK/Client.
Aspen InfoPlus.21	AspenTech IP.21 Connection	Separate Windows agent (console or Windows service) using SqlPlus ODBC to query IP.21.
Canary Historian	REST Client Connection	Canary exposes web/REST APIs; Hub’s REST Client supports flexible auth & formats.
Honeywell Uniformance PHD	REST Client Connection	Honeywell documents RESTful API capabilities for PHD (availability by version)
AVEVA Historian	Microsoft SQL Server	AVEVA Historian retrieval uses SQL Server/OLE DB; Hub’s MSSQL connection is appropriate.

Connections overview and scope

Configuration details are out of scope. For step-by-step setup, see the Intelligence Hub User Guide and Knowledge Base.

Connections used with common historians

- AVEVA PI System Connection
  - Standard, configurable connection.
  - Includes a Windows Service Agent.
  - Starter solutions are available for scenarios with and without the Asset Framework.
- Aspen InfoPlus.21 Connection
  - Standard, configurable connection.
  - Includes a Windows Service Agent.
- REST Client Connection
  - Used to exchange data with Canary Historian and Honeywell PHD.
  - Starter solutions are available for Canary.
  - Similar concepts can be applied to Honeywell PHD.
- Microsoft SQL Server Connection
  - Used to exchange data with AVEVA Historian.
  - Starter solutions are not provided for AVEVA Historian.
  - The Aspen InfoPlus.21 starter solution concepts can be applied because both use database-type queries.

Typical Intelligence Hub solutions

The following captures the Intelligence Hub solutions related to historians that we typically observe. Starter solutions are available for many of the scenarios below.

Solution	Description
Read point or tag names	Obtain a list of points or tag names, or identifiers Often this is a necessary first step
Read last values	Poll to obtain the last values Typically, a wide table format Often combined with data from other systems
Read values for time span	Obtain values between start and end time Could be a statis, dynamic, or rolling time span May require indexing Typically, a narrow table format
Read values, including late-arriving values	Obtain value changes (add, update, insert, delete) Typically, a narrow table format
Read event data (AVEVA PI Event Frame)	Obtain data related to an event Typically, a wide table format
Read point or tag metadata	Obtain metadata for points or tags Typically, a wide table format
Read asset metadata	Obtain metadata like an asset or hierarchy Typically, a wide table format
Write values	Write values to a point or tag
Write metadata	Create metadata like an asset

Summary

Starter solutions accelerate time-to-value by giving you a ready-to-run baseline for historian scenarios. Use them to learn patterns and then tailor them for your environment, scale, and operability needs.