ObX Historian R5.00 Release Notes
🚀 ObX Historian R5.00
The Next Generation of Industrial Data Infrastructure
ObX Historian R5.00 represents one of the most significant upgrades in the platform's history. This release introduces a completely redesigned historian architecture, a modern web-based administration experience, advanced asset modeling capabilities, event-driven data management, and major performance enhancements designed to support enterprise-scale deployments.
Important: Due to major architectural improvements and platform redesigns, this release contains several breaking changes. Customers are encouraged to review all release notes and migration considerations before upgrading existing installations.
Breaking Changes
ObX Historian
Completely Redesigned Web-Based Administration Platform
The traditional desktop administration tool has been replaced with a modern web-based administration portal, providing centralized management, improved accessibility, and enhanced operational visibility.
New Administration Features
📊 Dashboard
Gain instant visibility into your historian environment through a centralized dashboard.
Features include:
- Historian health monitoring
- Storage utilization metrics
- Database performance statistics
- Data ingestion rates
- System resource utilization
- Quick operational insights and diagnostics
🌳 Tag Browser
Introducing a next-generation asset-centric tag management experience.
Features include:
- Tree-based asset hierarchy
- Digital representation of physical plant assets
- Structured navigation across millions of time-series tags
- Improved organization and discoverability
- Simplified tag administration and maintenance
- Asset-oriented data modeling
The Tag Browser enables users to transition from flat tag structures to a scalable enterprise asset framework.
🗄️ Data Tables
A powerful new capability that extends ObX Historian beyond traditional time-series storage.
Features include:
- User-defined table schemas
- Flexible data governance models
- Manual data entry support
- Production and batch records
- Quality management data
- Laboratory information
- Operational logs
- Business contextualization data
Data Tables allow organizations to combine operational time-series data with contextual business information in a single platform.
⚡ Events Engine
Automatically generate event records based on operational conditions and business logic.
Examples include:
- Equipment start/stop events
- Batch execution events
- Alarm transitions
- State changes
- Production milestones
- Custom script-based triggers
Benefits:
- Automated event capture
- Simplified batch reporting
- Reduced manual data entry
- Enhanced operational traceability
- Improved root-cause analysis
💾 Backup Management
Enterprise-grade backup capabilities are now integrated directly into the administration portal.
Features include:
- Scheduled backups
- Manual backups
- Backup monitoring
- Simplified recovery workflows
- Reduced administrative overhead
🔐 API Token Management
Secure integration with external systems through standardized REST APIs.
Features include:
- Token-based authentication
- Granular API access control
- Secure Read/Write operations
- Third-party application integration
- MES integration
- ERP integration
- Analytics platform connectivity
- Custom application development support
New Historian Engine
ObX Historian R5.00 introduces an entirely new historian engine engineered for extreme scalability, performance, and reliability.
Performance Improvements
- Significantly faster data ingestion
- Improved query response times
- Reduced storage overhead
- Optimized memory utilization
- Enhanced concurrent client handling
- Improved compression efficiency
- Better high-frequency data processing
Enterprise Scalability
- Supports millions of tags per server
- Massive time-series data retention capabilities
- Designed for large-scale industrial deployments
- Improved horizontal scalability architecture
- Optimized for modern edge-to-enterprise data strategies
Enhanced Data Organization
Users can now benefit from two complementary data management approaches:
Asset Tree View
Ideal for:
- Equipment-based navigation
- Plant hierarchy modeling
- Asset-centric analytics
- Operational visibility
Table View
Ideal for:
- Structured business data
- Batch records
- Production records
- Laboratory information
- Operational reporting
This dual-model architecture provides greater flexibility than traditional historian platforms.
Reliability Enhancements
- Improved data integrity mechanisms
- Enhanced fault tolerance
- Better recovery capabilities
- Optimized write buffering
- Increased operational stability
ObX Collector
Next-Generation Collection Engine
ObX Collector R5.00 introduces a completely redesigned collection architecture focused on scalability, performance, and enterprise asset modeling.
🌳 Asset Modeling Framework
Create reusable digital asset templates and deploy them throughout your organization.
Features include:
- Asset template creation
- Custom asset parameters
- Asset inheritance
- Reusable asset definitions
- Rapid deployment of large asset structures
- Seamless integration with Historian Tag Browser
Benefits:
- Faster project development
- Standardized asset models
- Reduced engineering effort
- Improved maintainability
⚡ Optimized Data Buffering
Significant improvements have been made to edge-side data management.
Features include:
- Faster buffering engine
- Reduced local storage requirements
- Improved store-and-forward capabilities
- Better network outage resilience
- Enhanced synchronization performance
Benefits:
- Lower storage consumption
- Improved reliability
- Reduced infrastructure requirements
- Better remote-site performance
📡 Real-Time Data Distribution
Collector can now distribute live industrial data to multiple systems simultaneously.
Supported protocols include:
- MQTT
- CoAP
- WebSocket
Use Cases:
- Real-time dashboards
- Cloud integrations
- Enterprise messaging systems
- Digital twin applications
- AI and machine learning platforms
- Custom industrial applications
Benefits:
- Reduced integration complexity
- Lower latency data delivery
- Improved interoperability
- Modern event-driven architectures
📈 New ObX Excel Add-in
A completely redesigned Excel integration experience is now available in ObX Historian R5.00.
The new ObX Excel Add-in delivers significantly improved performance, enhanced usability, and a modernized data retrieval engine, enabling users to efficiently access, analyze, and report historian data directly from Microsoft Excel.
Key Enhancements
⚡ High-Performance Query Engine
The Excel Add-in now utilizes an optimized query architecture designed for faster retrieval of large historical datasets.
Benefits include:
- Faster data loading and refresh operations
- Improved handling of large time ranges
- Better responsiveness when working with millions of records
- Reduced waiting times for reports and calculations
🎨 Modern User Interface
The user experience has been completely redesigned to simplify data access and report creation.
Features include:
- Streamlined navigation and workflows
- Improved tag and asset browsing experience
- Easier parameter configuration
- Enhanced report generation process
- Reduced learning curve for new users
🌳 Asset-Aware Data Selection
Seamlessly browse and select historian data through the new asset hierarchy model.
Features include:
- Tree-based asset navigation
- Faster tag discovery
- Logical equipment organization
- Simplified selection of time-series data
📊 Enhanced Reporting Capabilities
Create powerful operational and management reports directly within Excel.
Use Cases:
- Production reporting
- Energy monitoring
- Batch analysis
- KPI dashboards
- Regulatory compliance reports
- Maintenance and reliability reporting
🔄 Improved Data Refresh and Connectivity
Designed for enterprise environments where reliability and performance are critical.
Benefits include:
- Faster refresh cycles
- More stable connections
- Improved handling of large datasets
- Better scalability for multi-user reporting environments
Business Value
The new Excel Add-in bridges the gap between industrial operations and business reporting, enabling engineers, operators, analysts, and management teams to transform historian data into actionable insights with greater speed and efficiency than ever before.
Summary
ObX Historian R5.00 delivers a major technological leap forward, introducing:
- Completely redesigned Web Administration Portal
- New Enterprise Historian Engine
- Asset-Centric Tag Browser
- Flexible Data Tables
- Automated Events Engine
- Integrated Backup Management
- Secure API Token Framework
- Enhanced Scalability for Millions of Tags
- New Asset Modeling Framework
- Optimized Data Buffering
- Real-Time Data Distribution via MQTT, CoAP, and WebSocket
This release establishes the foundation for the next generation of industrial data management, providing greater scalability, flexibility, and operational intelligence than ever before.