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Dear Zar, dear Community, dear PTC,
currently I am playing around with Thingworx and InfluxDB and really early in this process I faced the same question ... and before you start asking for more details, here they are:
Thingworx support the influxDB as a PersistanceProvider for ValueStreams and Streams!
Both have a different functionality and usage.
(Where the usage and the HowTo of streams is still unclear to me. Documentation here is also not very informative and stops after “how to create a stream”, no info on “how to use” it.
As most other PTCs documentation it stops when it comes to the interesting fun part ... ☹).
So, let’s have a short look at InfluxDB main schema objects. There are:
Now let’s have a look on how Thingworx maps it’s data to the schema for value streams.
For streams this is a little bit different:
So Thingworx makes some use of InfluxDB tags, but not in a way, that could be useful for users of the raw data in influx. The SELECT statement of InfluxDB allows WHERE clause & GROUP BY clause, but without TAGS it makes no sense to use it.
An example:
Let’s assume a real to real process. The machine is represented by a thing with many different properties representing process parameters, that may quickly change like:
Additionally, the thing has some “none process information”, that do not or only seldom change like:
So, the data of the first category will mostly we part of an SELECT statement, where the information of the second category is more likely to be used in WHERE and GROUP BY clauses. So this information should be handled as meta data and stored in tags to allow performant WHERE and GROUP BY clauses.
How could this be integrated to Thingworx? I see many possibilities:
Please! This feature is fundamental for the InfluxDB. Otherwise we only have some time series storage, that is of no other use than … give me some values in [TS1-TS2]. That’s not what InfluxDB is meant for.
Many Greetings
Andreas
Thank you for this feedback. It was good to meet you Andreas yesterday.
I have passed along this as a sample use case to drive our future work with the InFlux team. I don't anticipate any significant changes to the InFlux until latter half of 2021 given some other items that are on our roadmap (Enterprise Kepware Configuration Management, and Streaming and Enrichment performance/scale improvements, and a new Digital Performance Management solution).
However, as we know time series support is a key for nearly all of our platform customers, I do foresee us making improvements to our use of InFlux once we burn down a few other items on our backlog.