Best practice for mirroring and backing up DSC Citadel Database

[pai193387]

Hello, 

We have been using DSC for a while with a centralized PC hosting about variables accessed by about 10 PCs. One of the major vulnerabilities is that we hosted all the variables on one PC, hence we sometimes lost some points when this PC is offline. 

Since there exist "aliasing" functionality in the NI distributed system manager, one solution that I can think of is let each satellite PC hosts a subset of relevant variables, then alias those variables to the copies of the centralized database, with the DSC database logging enabled in all of the PCs. Furthermore, setup a periodic mutual archiving process.

I guess my question is, is this a recommended way of distributing the responsibility of PCs and enhancing the robustness and the accessibility of the databases? Or do people eventually export their databases to other database management solutions, such as SQL, since there has been not many changes for this DSC module of LabVIEW for the past few years.

Thanks a lot.  

[G-IV · Accepted solution]

Hi pai193387,

Based on your questions and some conversations I had with one of our system engineers, it looks like your questions are not specific enough for me to be able to give you answers that are tailored to your application - but I can give you some general direction.

Depending on how lossless you need your system to be (do you need to capture 100% of your data, or is 99.99% ok?), your solutions may look a little different.

1) The DSC module can work with a SQL database - but the setup is not as abstracted, so it is going to take more work to get this working.

2) If you have an established IT, you should be able to work with them to get a robust system that can manage the database for you.  If you do have a IT service, you should really be having this conversation them, as well.

3) There are online database options, such as those offered through Amazon - they cost money and you would have to figure out how to develop a link between LabVIEW and their web services.  But this would give you a highly robust database.

4) You could use NI DIAdem - I think that our website will do a better job of describing this than I will: http://www.ni.com/en-us/innovations/big-analog-data/data-management.html

Again, this is all general information - but I don't know a whole lot about your system or what resources you have at your disposal.  So it is hard to give you any real specifics.

Regards,

George B.

Applications Engineer

National Instruments