Ignition 8.3

Inductive Automation Ignition is a software suite for industrial automation, deployed by hundreds of companies worldwide. The platform includes a variety of tools, including a SCADA system, IIoT integrations, and monitoring and reporting capabilities.

The release of Ignition 8.3 integrates QuestDB in the new Core Historian module, replacing the legacy SQLite based historian. This module raises the performance ceiling, making the Core Historian a viable turnkey solution for industrial time-series data, without the need to invest in (and configure) an external traditional RBDMS.

Prerequisites​

Getting started​

For initial configuration of the Core Historian, please follow the Inductive University introductory video.

Core Historian Introduction

QuestDB is fully-integrated behind the scenes, and all tag historian actions can be performed via the UI.

UI properties​

Additional configuration settings can be found in the Core Historian documentation.

Some of the properties correspond to specific QuestDB features:

  • Partition Interval
    • This corresponds to the PARTITION BY clause of a CREATE TABLE statement.
    • Data will be vertically partitioned according to the provided unit.
    • See partition concepts for more information.
  • Data Deduplication
    • This corresponds to the DEDUP clause of a CREATE TABLE statement.
    • New rows which match the deduplication keys will be replaced instead of inserted as new rows.
    • See dedup concepts for more information.

Gateway configuration​

Additional settings can be configured in the gateway to control the backing QuestDB instance's behaviour. These are specified in the Gateway and Gateway and Gateway Network Parameters documentation.

Direct queries​

Ignition can be configured to expose QuestDB's Postgres wire server, allowing for read queries to be run directly against the underlying database.

  • historian.questdb.pgwireServerEnabled
    • Corresponds to pg.enabled in QuestDB's server.conf
    • Enables the PG Wire server on the default port (8812).
  • historian.questdb.pgwireServerPort
    • Corresponds to the port half of pg.net.bind.to in QuestDB's server.conf.
    • Changes the server port from the default (8812) to the specified integer.

Resource usage​

Ignition also exposes settings to control the amount of memory allocated to the underlying database.

  • historian.questdb.ramUsageLimitBytes
    • Corresponds to ram.usage.limit.bytes in QuestDB's server.conf.
    • Controls the amount of RAM allocated to the database in bytes.
  • historian.questdb.ramUsageLimitPercent
    • Corresponds to ram.usage.limit.percent in QuestDB's server.conf.
    • Control the amount of RAM allocated to the database as a percentage of system memory.