Data Historian
A data historian is a system that collects and stores time-series data from industrial equipment, sensors, and control systems. It is the system of record for what happened on a plant floor or across operational technology over time.
The role of the historian, and its cost
Historians have been a fixture of industrial operations for decades. They capture readings from sensors and control systems, store them reliably, and let engineers look back at how a process behaved. Names like the PI System are deeply embedded in manufacturing, energy, and utilities.
The downside is that traditional historians are proprietary, licensed by tag or by data volume, and expensive to scale. Their data formats are closed, which makes integrating with modern analytics and machine learning awkward and locks operators into one vendor.
Many industrial teams are now looking for an open, cost-effective alternative that still handles the volume and reliability they need.
How Arc handles Data Historian
Arc offers an open alternative to the proprietary historian. It captures high-volume industrial time-series, stores it as open Parquet you own, and queries it with standard SQL, so operational data is no longer trapped in a closed, per-tag-licensed system.
Related terms
Arc is a high-performance columnar database. Open Parquet on storage you own, single Go binary, production-ready in 30 seconds.