Systems Integration using PI Interface

Not sure about the Visual Mesa package, but for the others, the PI-RDBMS interface is a common approach for LIMS integration. I've integrated LabWare a couple of times with this. For the third package, I'm assuming you are referring to Energy Components from Tieto. They do have a native PI connector, but when we looked at it a few years ago it was still PI-API based. Unless they have a more up to date native connector, you are probably going to be looking at backend DB integration. Depending on the Oracle version, you may or may not be able to use Generic Connectivity with the PI OLEDB or PI-ODBC drivers. The other part of this, is whether you want one way or two way data flow between PI and EC. The current location where I am pulls data into EC from PI via SQL Server.

To add a bit to what John mentioned above, I know from some previous experience that StarLIMS has an OPC piece that you can use the OPC DA interface with. Also not very familiar with Visual Mesa but if you can figure out what kinds of way it exposes data we could provide a more complete answer.

--Vince

Thanks for the valuable input! The type of data exchange is still in discussion. Correct me if I am wrong, StarLIMS is using web service for server client communication? Just for sharing, seems like OPC  Interface is the only option available for the Visual Mesa data access.

Ah yes, now that you mention it, it has an OPC XML compliant piece that we can use to get data. So this would be using the OPC XML interface.