NEWSROOM

This video, featuring EN Automation’s Kevin Collins, technical director, and Brad Shade, senior principal control systems engineer, explains how to query a galaxy database in order to retrieve extra information and complement current capabilities.

They begin with a basic walkthrough of the tooling they display on screen, including a dev system and SQL server management studio. This is the tool used to connect to the system platform database that is created alongside your galaxy.

Next, they displayed a database called sandbox, the system platform IDE, and a sandbox galaxy that they did their queries against. They used a CQL server management studio to begin their change log query, which enables users to see what has happened in their galaxy or retrieve objects that may have changed.

One of the main tables used is the G Object Change Log. This table not only defines each object in the galaxy server, but it also contains all change log information for each one, including what was changed, when, who did so, and any comments made.

The query was organized into two columns and includes the ability to filter for the specific information being searched for. These built-in capabilities allow for plenty of flexibility, whether users are searching for a timestamp, undeployed changes, or other items.

Queries such as this have been used at several clients’ facilities and allowed them to see changes made in their galaxy during a particular time frame. This can help to show that their system has stabilized from development or troubleshooting.

Another feature of a galaxy database is the ability to look at IO references and query against a table or tables that provide a parent template and IO mapping.

Taking advantage of this allows users to pull IO mappings directly from the galaxy database, search for an input source or wild card, and even run stat. This information means users can use the IDE to reference them.

When it comes to uses for this type of query and resulting information, some examples include updating references, moving register mappings, and searching for a specific object, OPC client object, or scan group. These, and others like them, narrow the scope.

Another tool is the orchestral object attribute, update load builder. It was built to expedite EN Automation’s development projects and allow for quick updates to specific attributes in the system platform galaxy. These include alarm priorities, IO mappings, and auto IO binding. It’s a very efficient way to pull IO information from the database.

The last query discussed in the video is the ID’s security models. This is used to answer client questions about the security configuration in their galaxy and which objects are in each security group. This query is a huge time-saver compared to paging through the ID in a large system with many objects.

Using these types of queries creates an environment in which users can do a little more and dig a little deeper. It also helps to answer questions when a client is upgrading or would like to better understand how things such as security are configured.

A word of caution: One important thing to remember is to not modify tables in the galaxy base with queries you’re doing. Modifying directly within tables is not a supported feature; instead, select statements without making changes.