In another guest post, our Senior
Software Engineer, Ken Wyant, explains the hardships of coming up with your own
data solution:
"When companies search and evaluate historians for enterprise wide data, many are hesitant to commit to the cost of a true time-series historian. Many times they respond with the answer: “We are going to try and come up with our own solution”. However, what is overlooked is the technical expertise and experience required to store and retrieve the massive amounts of historical and real-time data required for the facets of the business. They think that they can come up with a more cost efficient solution. The problem is that this solution, in the long run, ends up costing the company more, takes longer to build and implement, and it fails to achieve the results that they intend or lacks the desired performance. Often times companies who try to build their own solution, end up coming back and regretting that decision. The negative outcome most often results in the company going back to the solution they originally had tried to avoid: switching to a true enterprise historian.
Finding a solution that works may be easier than you think.
Usually the perceived cheaper solution that a company comes up with, entails a relational database, such as SQL server or Oracle. These databases normally don’t have an issue with the storage of large amounts of data. However, when it comes to reading and retrieving the data, you quickly find limitations. Often you’ll find scheduled jobs to trim the tables or archive older data to another table or maintenance plans to rebuild indexes periodically. Why? Because performance starts degrading and they don’t have any options except to manage the amount of data online and readily available. A true time series historian won’t require you to lop off data or rebuild indexes weekly OR require data to be moved offline in case you might need to access it again.
Can a company build their own solution that works? Perhaps for a while. But at the same time, it won’t work the way that they expect or envisioned it to. You want the data, and you want it fast. You don’t want all of the data, you want specific results. If that describes you, than maybe you should skip the attempt at developing a home grown solution and allow Canary Labs to provide you with the long term solution that you need.
There is great value in your data if you can get access to it. We find that the companies that commit to this investment with Canary will many times get their return on investment within a few months. Those that work closely and develop the partnership relationship with Canary benefit even more as ideas and innovative techniques are offered, exchanged and developed for game changing solutions for their companies. The Canary Labs mission is to provide superior value to our customers and develop long-term client relationships that exceed customer expectations. Maybe it is time to see what Canary Labs can do for you!"
