Performance Evaluation of TimescaleDB for Storage of Historical Data from WinCC OA SCADA Systems

This project was completed in the scope of NextGen Archiver (NGA) for WinCC OA SCADA systems. The NGA is a new archiver for WinCC OA that uses a pluggable architecture to support multiple database technologies. This project was part of a wider effort to benchmark a range of database technologies to understand their limits in terms of functionality and performance in the context of CERN use cases. The benchmarking methodology involves producing realistic test data and performing write and read benchmarks on the database technologies under the test. The specific focus of this project was to perform ingestion benchmarking on TimescaleDB and PostgreSQL. We obtained an ingestion rate of 80K rows/second for TimescaleDB one-node and 150K rows/second for TimescaleDB two-node making them 2X and 3X higher than that of PostgreSQL which is around 40K rows/second. As the benchmark runs progressed we observed a considerable decline in the ingestion rate for PostgreSQL, but the ingest rate was stable for TimescaleDB. The work on the benchmarks will continue and focus on query performance and evaluation of different schema variants.