How to query data from an AspenTech IP21 Historian?
Old subject, combined with new tools: What would be the best/appropriate way to query data for a web application from an AspenTech IP21 (InfoPlus.21) data historian?
In the past, I've used some pretty awful queries via the Aspen SqlPlus ODBC driver, but that doesn't seem like the right approach, as it doesn't seem to install on Win 7 at all.
Anyone here have experience with that?
Answer
1) make sure you have appropriate version of Aspen tools, later ones (7.1, 7.2) will run on Windows 7 with no problems
2) I have worked with Aspen IP21 going over 15 years and have never had issues with SQL performance compared to other databases like Oracle or SQL server as long as the IP21 is on an approriate server and the query is written appropriately per the structure of the database. Doing a join against timestamp is going to produce a slow query. Depending on what you want to accomplish, there are multiple other ways to get data, through HISTORY pseudo table, AGGREGATES table, or other query techniques that are specific to IP21.
3) ODBC is still the most standard, easiest, and to me best performance for getting data from Ip21 form any client, ASP, .Net, web page, other databases, VB programs, Excel VBA, etc. Just may need some optimization tweaking probably in how SQL is written.