Dream Report Drivers for Industrial and Business Data

The Connectivity Value Proposition – Visibility to ALL your Data

Imagine telling your team that you’ve found an industrial solution that can connect to data from anywhere in your plant, and from any system.  Moreover, it can generate any statistics for reports and dashboards, even combining the data from all your sources.  It will do all that automatically, delivering the results you desire to those that need it and it can do that interactively, through quick and easy to develop dashboards of your own design.  That’s the benefit of Dream Report!

All Data Types – Real-time, History, Analog, Discrete, Alarm and Event

But it gets even more amazing.  There are several forms of data that unlike business tools, Dream Report offers purpose built handling for.  These include Real-time, Alarm and Historical data structures.  A Real-time Data Source provides access to instantaneous data or data that is a response to a current value query.  This is important for real-time dashboards and statistics, and for triggering analytics based on process parameters.  An example can be the automatic generation of an End of Batch Report or the generation of a Run Report for a piece of equipment.  Alarm History data typically comes from connection to an Alarm or Event Log, that can be queried for a range of information.  These logs offer many fields for querying and it is common to generate reports of the most common alarms, alarms sorted by priority, equipment, site or by operator.  There are even best practices for alarm reporting (ISA 18.2), that define how alarms should be managed over time for continuous improvement.  Finally, Historical Data is typically provided by a database of some sort and can be queried for arrays of data.  In many cases, History data from specialized Historian products can be pre-filtered or pre-analyzed by the Historian.  Historian data is also often stored with compression to improve performance and reduce archive sizes.  This compression can be a challenge for traditional Business Intelligence products.  Dream Report understands these challenges and will make use of ALL your data sources, in the most powerful ways possible.

Drivers for Accessing Data through Standard and Proprietary Interfaces

Drivers (connectors or interfaces to data sources) also fall into several categories.  There are industry standards for connectivity such as those of the OPC Foundation (OPC DA, OPC AE, OPC HDA, OPC UA), and MODBUS – a simple protocol that is quite pervasive in industry.  There are a wide range of proprietary communication protocols, specialized to the various vendors in the automation marketplace.  There are also business standards such as ODBC, OLE-DB, and standard file formats like CSV or Microsoft Excel.  Dream Report offers connectivity to most products in industry through one or more of these interfaces.  There is usually more than one way to offer connectivity to the data sources you’ll want to report on.  All Drivers are included with Dream Report (however OEM versions of Dream Report, available from many different automation vendors, will vary).

Ocean Data Systems has developed a DDK (Driver Development Kit), streamlining the development of new drivers.  The addition of a new Driver is a common occurrence and if you have requirements, please contact us.  Sales@dreamreport.com