SQL On Steroids

At our plant we have machines that are controlled by Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's). They are basically computers that can be programmed to control switches and pumps and can also read sensors such as thermalcouplers.

The PLCs are capable of generating LOTS of data and quite frequently we need to capture that data. To do that we're using a product from Wonderware called InSql. The product is capable of recording several thousand values per millisecond and give the programmer the ability to view a snapshot through MS SQL Server.

I've been spending the last few days studying the internals of the product. It's actually built along side of MSSQL Server. It stores it's configuration in a SQL database and exposes its data using OLEDB. InSql uses its own data format outside of SQL Server to achieve its high performance.

InSql also has the unique ability to interpolate values which is really nice when building portals for operations. InSql can be setup to poll on a certain interval yet be queried on a different interval.

I actually think out of all of Microsoft's products SQL server in my opinion is the best built. It's just rock solid and it was a good call from Wonderware to build along side it with InSql.