This article was originally published on AutomationWorld.com on January 8, 2024.
Everyone loves spaghetti! Who doesn’t remember their grandmother cooking spaghetti, the aroma filling the house, the anticipation of a delicious, hearty meal? It’s a universal comfort food, often bringing back fond memories of family gatherings and cozy dinners. However, while spaghetti on your dinner plate is a delightful experience, ‘spaghetti code’ in the context of PLC programming is far less appetizing. Read More
Connecting SCADA systems and other applications to databases have been common for quite some time. SCADA platforms from GE, Rockwell, and Wonderware for instance, require that connection to be made utilizing a connection string. A database connection string is simply a string variable containing all the detail for an application to connect to the database. While there are many different resources which define the format of a connection string, creating one can prove to be frustrating as the syntax needs to be perfect in order to work. Read More
We are currently working with a greenfield food and beverage startup and are implementing a unified namespace. To put it simply, a unified namespace is a centralized repository of structured data in which any application or device can subscribe and/or publish data to. In our case this centralized repository is an MQTT broker.
For plant floor device integration, we are using HighByte Intelligence Hub to model information from plant floor devices and ‘flow’ that data to the broker.
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Over the past couple of years, we have upgraded several Wonderware Historian systems and ran into an issue which others may have run into as well. Prior to Historian 2014 R2 (released in 2017), Wonderware Historian was packaged with MS SQL Server Standard. SQL Server Standard allowed for the ability to schedule maintenance procedures such as database backups. Post 2014 R2, the Wonderware Historian came packaged with SQL Server Express which lacks maintenance plans. Read More
