Editor's Pick: Solution Automates Big Analog Data Handling

It once was that measuring stuff like radio frequency signals, pressure, temperature and what have you happened as fast as your analog-to-digital conversions and storage went, which wasn't that fast. Still, you had a hill of data to sift through to gain insights. Today, hardware speed is not the issue with collecting data. It's the data glut. National Instruments calls it Big Analog Data. You may call it something more earthy. No matter what you call it, the mountains of measured data are growing bigger and bigger.

NI has the chops when it comes to getting and coping with sensor data. They've been doing it for at least forever now. With little fanfare, they recently rolled out something called the Data Management Software Suite. It sounds straightforward and immensely useful.

NI's Data Management Software Suite, an enterprise solution, melds tools from the company's Technical Data Management solution portfolio with a new application that automates the search, standardization, analysis and reporting of measurement data. Image courtesy of National Instruments.

The Suite is an enterprise solution. It's engineered to help you manage all that measurement data and then tease out their insights. How? By simplifying how you inspect and verify data for consistencies and errors that lead to bad results by making the process less manual and more automated.

The Data Management Software Suite is made up of three NI data management tool chests, one of which is a new product. Two of the applications already form a server-based data-management solution. One is DIAdem Professional for managing, processing and visualizing measurement data. The other is DataFinder Server Edition Advanced for file-based data management and data mining.

The new application is called the Analysis Server. It helps you automate the search, standardization, analysis and reporting of large amounts of measurement data. With Analysis Server, you can interactively set up programming logic to decide which analyses run. It can host 10,000 analysis routines that you can apply on the data based on its content.

That is, with its introduction, NI’s DIAdem-DataFinder server-based data management solution expands into automated data processing. And the importance of all this is that you can now set up, maintain and fine-tune a repeatable and automated process to find and extract the insights in your data that you need to make informed decisions. Pretty good.

You can learn more about NI's Data Management Software Suite in today's Editor's Pick of the Week write-up. However, what you may want to do is hit the link at the end of the write-up and download an evaluation copy to see what it could mean for you.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE