Data Storage

Iotellect can store many different types of data, from relatively simple machine-generated time series, like temperature or voltage measurements, to more complex data, such as network topologies. Arbitrary data structures can be created to represent entities with different types of data, such as user accounts or support tickets.

The documentation provided in this section is applicable only to on-premise and edge Iotellect server instances. Cloud server users get Iotellect and its storage facilities as a managed service.

All the stored data has a rigid classification; there are five classes of data that the platform works with:

  • Configurations, which comprise data associated with servers, contexts, devices, or other system resource settings. At the lowest level, configurations are represented as the current values of context variables. Generally, if a variable is stored in system storage, it is classified as having the Configuration type, even if the value does not affect the behavior of the system as a whole.

  • Events comprise all context event data and associated timestamps, including variable change events, which have been stored in the database. The current value of a variable is considered a Configuration value, while its historical values are stored as events.

  • Binary data (or binary data blocks) includes all data stored as binary files. Images, audio and video files, and certain documents are all saved as binary data in Iotellect.

  • Statistics are time series, aggregated over fixed time periods, and saved in this aggregated state to provide rapid data extraction for arbitrary historical periods.

  • Topologies describe data comprising nodes, edges, and related properties (such as labels or edge weights) and stored in a graph database. Topologies can be used to capture the relationships between physical or abstract objects with complex or dynamic structures not suitable for relational databases. Relationships of any kind (provided they are comprised of elements that can be described as nodes and edges) can be visualized with the Graph component, regardless of whether they are stored in a Topology data structure.

The following sections describe how these types of data are stored in Iotellect and which databases are most suitable for various use cases.

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