DIAdem success of horror stories? Somewhat off topic

[george seifert]

Sorry if this is an inappropriate place to ask this, but since it's an NI product I thought it might fit.

I'm looking at using DIAdem mainly for it's data finding ability. My boss is worried because no one else here is using it (this is a big place). But the systems that other departments do use aren't appropriate for our situation. I've put together a few demos with LV talking to DIAdem to retrieve data that work pretty well, but there's still the unknown of how well it will scale up when we start getting tons of data. I'm just wondering if anyone else has a success or horror story using DIAdem (10.0 or up).

Thanks for any response,

George

[Ton Plomp]

QUOTE(george seifert @ Aug 15 2007, 09:35 PM)

Sorry if this is an inappropriate place to ask this, but since it's an NI product I thought it might fit.

I'm looking at using DIAdem mainly for it's data finding ability. My boss is worried because no one else here is using it (this is a big place). But the systems that other departments do use aren't appropriate for our situation. I've put together a few demos with LV talking to DIAdem to retrieve data that work pretty well, but there's still the unknown of how well it will scale up when we start getting tons of data. I'm just wondering if anyone else has a success or horror story using DIAdem (10.0 or up).

Thanks for any response,

George

We're transferring our whole measurement system into data storage with TDMS, and reporting using DIADem.

I've written some VIs to tag each channel inside a TDMS with a GUID, and the GUID of it's parent. The idea is to copy this GUID if we apply any data analyses so we can trace data back. The DIADem data-mining we can easily find the measurement were the DATA originally belongs to.

What do you mean by tons?

If it is really a serious amount I'd look into the server edition, so you only have the data-mining database in just one place.

For us DIADem has been a steep learning curve and I hope that NI will generate a toolkit to control the DIADem report functionality (analysis would seem a little but double), like the MS Office Report generating toolkit.

Ton

[Omar Mussa]

Here's my take. I used DIAdem from version 8.0-9 and have looked at 10 but not used it on any projects.

DIADem is actually pretty good for file based data analysis (TDMS or otherwise -- TDMS is really well integrated). At the worst case you can write a custom data plugin that will get you data from almost any file format into DIAdem. I found that using DIAdem with a database (like Oracle, MySQL, etc.) is more challenging and requires a lot more technical skill.

The key takehome skillset is a reasonable amount of VB knowledge (or even better VBS knowledge - but VBS seems less common and is pretty easy for VB programmers to pick up). Also, something I didn't realize until later in the game was that it is possible (even if it is cumbersome) to create objects using VBS. It is also possible to do a lot of data exchange between LabVIEW and DIAdem but I found that it was generally easier to write the code as VBS scripts than to use the DIAdem VIs (and I'm a power LabVIEW programmer -- it may be easier/better now but the DIAdem-LabVIEW API was not great when I was using it).

I recommend keeping code modular and keeping scripts separated by functionality (for example having a script for each class).

Utilize the NI help/support system when stuck because sometimes you run into pretty challenging problems that have already been solved. Good Luck!

[george seifert]

QUOTE(tcplomp @ Aug 15 2007, 04:10 PM)

We're transferring our whole measurement system into data storage with TDMS, and reporting using DIADem.

I've written some VIs to tag each channel inside a TDMS with a GUID, and the GUID of it's parent. The idea is to copy this GUID if we apply any data analyses so we can trace data back. The DIADem data-mining we can easily find the measurement were the DATA originally belongs to.

What do you mean by tons?

If it is really a serious amount I'd look into the server edition, so you only have the data-mining database in just one place.

Ton

Thanks for the encouraging words.

We'll have data coming in from 32 stations from one test and probably 10 stations for another test. I was thinking that the server edition would be necessary.

QUOTE

It is also possible to do a lot of data exchange between LabVIEW and DIAdem but I found that it was generally easier to write the code as VBS scripts than to use the DIAdem VIs (and I'm a power LabVIEW programmer -- it may be easier/better now but the DIAdem-LabVIEW API was not great when I was using it).

I heard that the LV interface from DIAdem 10.2 is supposed to be pretty good. I'll do whatever I can to avoid writing VB scripts.

George