topic Re: How to make ThingWorx data available for external analytics tools in ThingWorx Developers

How to make ThingWorx data available for external analytics tools

Do1 — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 20:24:41 GMT

The ThingWorx persistence provider may be a SQL database, but it is most certainly not a good idea to try and access the time series data with a DB tool to run analytics on it.

What would be the best mechanism to make data available for external analytics tools to analyse data acquired by ThingWorx?

Re: How to make ThingWorx data available for external analytics tools

PaiChung — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 11:43:30 GMT

If it is large amounts, I would create a service that pulls the data and saves it as a CSV in a file repository which can then be downloaded.

if you want, you could even do things like that on the persistence provider side as well, however the data is all stored as JSON so you'd have to create some transformation somewhere.

If it isn't too much data, your service can just return that data as an infotable and be called using a rest api call, or use the data export widget in a mashup

Re: How to make ThingWorx data available for external analytics tools

Do1 — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 06:55:34 GMT

Not a great solution, but I guess it is better than nothing..

Re: How to make ThingWorx data available for external analytics tools

rjanardan — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:01:22 GMT

Since you have mentioned time series data. I just wanted to add some more information. ThingWorx also supports InfluxDB as a persistence provider for storing time series data. It can handle high write and query loads. Currently only the high read and write throughput of InfluxDB is being exploited directly in ThingWorx. Implementing more features is in pipeline.
However, if you are fine with directly interacting with DB, then you could use InfluxDB API /query HTTP endpoint to take advantage of its other advanced features specific to time series data.

As long as you are careful not to corrupt data, it should be possible to visualize this data using Chronograf or Grafana and even analyse it using Kapacitor.

Re: How to make ThingWorx data available for external analytics tools

Do1 — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:43:31 GMT

Thanks rjanardan,

This seems like an interesting approach, unfortunately corporate guidelines determined that the persistence provider MUST be MSSQL.

Not the best idea as far as I am concerned.