Overview of the ODBC Collector

The ODBC collector collects data from an application based on an ODBC driver and stores the data in an on-premises Historian Server or a cloud destination. It supports collecting of all the Historian supported data types of data from the ODBC server.

Topology: The ODBC collector supports a distributed model, where the ODBC server, the collector, and the Historian server are installed on different machines. Typically, however, the collector is installed on the same machine as the ODBC server and sends data to a remote Historian server.

Features:
  • You can browse the source for tags and their attributes on an ODBC server that supports browsing.
  • Only the unsolicited data collection is supported; when changes to the ODBC source tags are detected, they are sent to the Historian server. The minimum poll interval is 100ms. The collector duplicates raw samples from the ODBC server into the Historian data archive.
  • The supported timestamp resolution is 1ms.
  • Floating point, integer, and string data are supported.
Note: The ODBC Driver for the SQL Server is required for the Historian Data Collector for installation; however, the ODBC Driver for SQL does not ship with Historian. If the ODBC Driver for SQL is not installed, the Historian Data Collector for ODBC will not connect to the ODBC server. If you install the Historian Data Collector for ODBC on a machine that does not contain the ODBC server, be sure to install the ODBC Driver for SQL on the machine with the Historian Data Collector for ODBC.
Supported Data Attributes:
Historian Data Type ODBC Server Data Type
ihByte Byte
ihFloat SingleFloat
ihDoubleFloat DoubleFloat
ihInteger SingleInteger
ihDoubleInteger DoubleInteger
ihScaled Not applicable
ihFixedString Not applicable
ihVariableString Not applicable
ihBlob Not applicable
ihTime Not applicable
ihInt64 Not applicable
ihUInt64 Not applicable
ihUInt32 Not applicable
ihUInt16 Not applicable
ihBool Not applicable
Limitations:
  • A single collector instance can collect data from a single ODBC server. To collect data from multiple ODBC servers, you must add multiple instances.
  • Only good and bad quality types are supported. OPC Quality and OPC Subquality are not supported.
  • If you want a domain user to use the ODBC collector, after you add an instance of a collector, when you later configure it, do not provide values in the User Name and Password fields. This is because the ODBC driver uses Windows authentication.