dataPARC Historian

Pros: Ease of use, stability, the platform offers the best HMI experience of all other products in the industry.

Cons: It’s challenging to pull MDE tags and sort by grade

Overall: A fantastic aide in running the process and by far the best user experience when compared to the others.

Pros: Quick, easily accessible, and visually clear data presentation. Easy enough to use that operators often already have trends built and tags pulled when troubleshooting before I ever get to the control room. Alarming and reporting functionality is very useful, other historian packages seem to require separate software packages to handle the alarm/reporting side of things, it is nice to have it all in one package.
I really like the parc calc server option, it is a great way to handle complex data manipulation in real time and allows us to take large amounts of data and refine it down to be more presentable for KPI sheets and daily scorecards.

Cons: Biggest struggle has been integrating the software into a network with changing IT security practices. The data collectors live on the process network and operators are accessing it from a business network there is a bit of management that must take place to ensure connectivity while also maintaining security. This would be an issue with any historian system, but because of the depth of deployment, the number of functions we rely on dataPARC for, and the amount of data we pass between the networks, any change in permissions or restrictions on the network can limit operability of the software suite. With other data historian systems since their functionality is more constrained, network issues don't reach as far.

Overall: Overall I really like the dataPARC suite and have found it vital to a large number of my day to day job functions. The native customizability of the suite in conjunction with added customizability you get from the calc server and excel add-in allows for us to get data quickly and in a presentable format for both the management team and operators. It takes a lot of work to get all the customization built out but it is well worth the time investment. The dataPARC team has helped us with a lot of the customization and their process engineers have been great to work with.

Pros: I like the speed for data retrieval as well as the ability to historize calculated tags. I also like the PARCdata interface that allows me to craft SQL queries for data retrieval. I've also been successful with a proof-of-concept using python OPC to retrieve historical data from their UA server. With the technical matching or superiority compared to competitors, the significantly lower price makes the decision obvious.

Cons: Really, the only aspect of the historian that I struggle with is the security console. It allows me to achieve what I need regarding security, but the learning curve was unexpected steep for me.

Overall: Overall, this historian outshines all other solutions. Support for interfacing with unique data sources, speed of both data storage and retrieval, real-time aggregation for even more speed improvement, and a price that alone sets it apart from competitors. Slam dunk.