Enea releases Polyhedra 8.1
Stockholm, Sweden, January 15, 2009 – Enea® (Nordic Exchange/Small Cap/ENEA), a world leading provider of network software and services, today announced the availability of Polyhedra® 8.1, which adds new features to their relational database management product family, and new platforms.
Polyhedra has been used for many years as the data store at the heart of SCADA systems, and the key features it brings to this market include high speeds (many thousands of transactions per second), high availability, a high-level trigger language (to allow business logic to be built into the database), its active query mechanism and its historian. Polyhedra 8.1 adds extra capabilities to the last two of these features, further enhancing the suitability of Enea's database management systems for use in process control and industrial automation. For the benefit of Telecom Equipment Manufacturers, Polyhedra has now been ported to the latest release of Enea's OSE real-time operating system, and MIPS has been added to the list of supported targets for Linux. In addition, customers using Enea OSE® can now use Enea LINX® communications protocol alongside or instead of TCP/IP, allowing improved performance and fault tolerance when connecting machines using heterogeneous OS environments, with any endianism issues automatically handled.
Active queries are a special Polyhedra feature that keeps client applications up to date, without having to poll the database to detect relevant changes. Polyhedra now offers the possibility of monitoring when active queries are started and cancelled. Thus, if the database is used to hold the state of various sensors around the factory, and a user is interested in monitoring the state of particular sensors, it is possible to ensure that priority is given to reading those sensors.
The Polyhedra historian module, which records time-stamped samples of selected live information in the database for later analysis, has been improved to further minimize the risk of data loss. As time-series data capture can produce huge volumes of changing information, especially at peak time, the historian uses in-memory buffers, which are written out to file when full. However, at less busy times it might take a while for the buffers to be filled, leaving the information at risk if fault-tolerant configurations are not being used. With the new enhancement the database designer can generate snapshots of the partly filled buffers when appropriate, reducing the risk of data loss in case of a system crash, without slowing down operations.