ClearSCADA: external data to Historian at regular intervals

[Anonymous user]

Hi All

There have been some similar questions [1], but I haven't found one that quite matches my use case.

* we are using the site ClearSCADA 2017 R3 historical data for reporting: summary, performance metrics, etc.

* the site ClearSCADA historical data is also used as a data concentrator for the national headquarters.

* we'd like to push report results back into the ClearSCADA historical database. Writing to live data is not preferred - the reports happen up to a day later, so pushing timestamped values back is very much preferred to time-of-data-arrival timestamps, i.e. if the data is pushed back in at 8 pm and shows values that happened at 2 pm, we'd like the values to be recorded as happening at 2 pm rather than 8 pm.

* if possible, it would also be good to be able to back-fill report data for several months. I believe there might be complications with this, however.

Currently we are pulling data from the database using the ODBC driver, querying CDBHistoric. However, CDBHistoric is read-only from ODBC (makes sense), so we need another way to get the data in.

Does anyone know if any of these work?

* ODBC to push timestamped historical data to a different table?

* Web API?

* Other scripting languages?

The only issue with the solution in the footnote is it's meant for manual data loading when someone clicks a mouse (deal-breaker) and is only good for data up to around 2 weeks old (not a deal-breaker). We need it to happen without user input e.g. every day at 6 am. Not clear if that's easy / possible / etc. Happy to RTFM, if someone could point me to the FM.  🙂

Thanks in advance

Jason

[1] https://community.se.com/t5/Geo-SCADA-Expert-Forum/Imported-CDBHISTORIC-table-SELECT-INSERT-UPDATE-e...

[geoffpatton]

Are you sure you can't write to it from ODBC, if your ODBC connected program is logged in with a user that has the right to edit history?

You can do this using the .net api. You could simply have a Windows task Scheduled the runs you program, or make your program run all the time and check for the file update.

We have a program that imports history and it is run all the time. It checks if the input file timestamp has changed and when it has it processes the data.

I really don't know the details of how the data is loaded into the history, I did not write the program.

[BevanWeiss]

What are the 'report results'?

From the way that you've currently described it, you have all this data in the ClearSCADA server, and then you send it to national headquarters for reporting... but then all the data should already existing in ClearSCADA... so I'm not sure what you'd be planning to push back in.

ClearSCADA can 'import' data from a wide range of sources via its Drivers.  One of those is ODBC.. so you could have it retrieving the report data from your national headquarters ODBC-compliant database if you wanted.. Using the driver you would then get this data into separate points (i.e. it wouldn't be the same point as you're reading from the field devices), so that might work for you.

[AdamWoodland · Accepted solution]

https://community.se.com/t5/Geo-SCADA-Knowledge-Base/Comparison-of-Methods-to-Transfer-Point-Data-Be... might be useful, Ecostruxture Web Services might be a good option to transfer data

[Anonymous user]

Not a bad idea @BevanWeiss , but they're not in a position to do this. For better or worse, the data workflow from site to office is:

(collect data on site) -> (perform performance and reliability calcs on site) -> (export to head office: subset of ClearSCADA data, plus on-site calcs).

They're expecting not every point at headquarters, and they are absolutely expecting on-site calcs to appear with certain tags. The sites are variable enough that this makes sense. It might not be how I'd do it, but it's not insane and it's what I have to work with.

[Anonymous user]

Thanks @geoffpatton for letting me know it's possible.

Other threads suggested that CDBHistoric is read-only to ODBC, and the error message I get simply says I'm not permitted to write to it. So I suspect it really can't be written to this way.