Historian is an open relational database for plant and process data. Many of the features of historian make it compatible with many other products. Client applications that can retrieve information using SQL can also retrieve data from Historian. Historian further extends SQL to improve the handling of time series data. Because Historian is a high-performance relational database, it is important to size your system to handle the level of data that you expect to store. Historian is often integrated with Microsoft products, and a working knowledge of both Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Windows operating systems is recommended. If you are running Historian on a VM, it must have adequate CPU, memory, and disk I/O resources at all times. Overloading the virtual server leads to unpredictable behavior.
See the system sizing examples in the following section for general hardware recommendations.
The following are system requirements for Historian:
- Guest operating systems—any supported 64-bit operating system
- Microsoft SQL Server—for supported 64-bit Microsoft SQL Server versions
- Disk space—300 MB of free disk space to install Historian (appropriate space for history block storage)