The Industrial Internet of Things is changing the way companies operate. Whether you have already adopted an IIoT strategy or are beginning the planning phases of how/where to begin, there are two key elements that you must first focus on. 

Canary recently hosted it's first Crash Course, a webinar designed to teach you how to functionally use a Canary product in less than 30 minutes.

Could Cassandra be optimized to store time-series data? This is a question that has become a common topic for discussion. I recently came across a great read that compares Cassandra performance to another dedicated time-series database, TimescaleDB.

It's exciting to discuss the virtues of collecting and storing years of process data with engineers and operators.  We often hear the ideas that are exchanged about what could be done and how the process could operate more efficiently if data was available to key individuals.  It has struck me recently how many times these data historian discussions seem limited by the fear of budget and deployment time.  Generally, by the end of a preliminary discussion, someone at the table sighs and makes a statement like, "It would be nice, but I'm sure the investment would be too much to consider".

"40 percent of the workforce at electric and gas utilities will be eligible for retirement in the next five years."

Recently, a system integrator asked us to provide data that would provide both speed and storage requirement comparisons between an out-of-the-box SQL database and Canary.  They wanted to use this data to decide whether it would be best for customer's to deploy a Canary system, or deploy, tune, and maintain an SQL system.

The tenth edition of a weekly Question and Answer column with Gary Stern, President and Founder of Canary Labs. Have a question you would like me to answer? Email askgary@canarylabs.com