Wonderware Connector - History Recovery

Wonderware Connector has limited historical data recovery capabilities. It can cover a few days back in time but has not been designed to perform both realtime values and configurable history recovery period as both processes are synchronous. An old date is configurable but it would delay real time values capture which is counterproductive with the nature of the connector. It is not a reproach; that's just what it is. That's we figured out when implementig and assessing connector with an excellent support from OSISOFT engineers. Our connector implementation project came with the need of nearly a year of historical data for 27000 tags, so millions and millions of values to read and write. We considered the method recommended in PI Square with RDBMS, we considered using a Matrikon product that allows the creation of an OPC HDA server, etc. In the end, all techniques will hit the Wonderware Historian SQL Database. The connector natively uses the Historian SDK which provides a direct access to Historian block files, which provides better performances. After a discussion with OSI teams they provided us, with no support, a utility they developped for their own use and that allows to recover historical data from Wonderware Historian. It is absolutely what we where looking for. Thumbs up ! It is easily configurable, based upon config and text files, run through, can be copied multiple times in different folders and be executed multiple times in parallel (in our case I run 5 distinct instances). I am convinced that such utility, even if not graphically integrated in the Wonderware Connector graphical interface would be the ideal tool for so many customers. It's easy to use and really does what's expected : recover historical data. In my humble view, with a few more testings and stress, I could be made officially available as a separate utility.