GE: The Advantages of Plant-wide Historians vs. Relational Databases

Relational databases (RDBs) have helped many manufacturers gain more information about their operations by supporting simple operator queries, answering questions such as “What customer ordered the largest shipment?” They are built to manage relationships and are ideal for storing contextual or genealogical information about manufacturing processes, but are rarely the best approach for vast amounts of process data collection and optimization.

On the other hand, plant-wide historians are designed for manufacturing and process data acquisition and presentation. They maximize the power of time series data and excel at answering questions that manufacturing typically needs to address real-time decisions in production such as “What was today’s hourly unit production average compared to where it was a year ago or two years ago?”

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the advantages of plant-wide historians over RDBs for data collection and time-series data optimization to enable true process visibility.