The modern historian for industrial scale

Ignition Enterprise Historian is a new historian experience from Inductive Automation designed to work with TimescaleDB. It combines the native Ignition experience operators and engineers already know with database infrastructure designed for demanding industrial workloads.

SQL Historian connects Ignition to a general-purpose SQL database that your team configures and operates. Enterprise Historian is purpose-built for historian workloads, with database setup, optimization, high availability, backup, monitoring, and lifecycle management built into the experience. It also pushes filtering and aggregation into TimescaleDB instead of pulling raw history into Ignition for processing.

With SQL Historian and TimescaleDB Community, TimescaleDB is used as a general-purpose SQL database, and your team is responsible for configuring, tuning, and operating the database environment. With Enterprise Historian and TimescaleDB Enterprise, historian-specific database setup and optimization are integrated into the Ignition experience, while TimescaleDB Enterprise provides production operations around the database, including high availability, backups, monitoring, and lifecycle management.

Core Historian is Ignition’s embedded, low-maintenance historian option. Enterprise Historian is designed for deployments that need a separate database foundation for larger or more operationally demanding industrial workloads, including requirements around scale, high availability, backups, and database operations.

No. Enterprise Historian is a dedicated historian integration, not simply a generic database connection. Ignition works with the TimescaleDB environment to configure the historian-specific database structures and settings required for the workload.

You should not need deep TimescaleDB expertise. Ignition guides the setup and automates historian-specific database configuration so teams do not have to design and tune the database from scratch. The current setup flow is Deploy → Select → Connect → Validate & Create.

No. Tiger Cloud is not required. The architecture supports customer-controlled deployments using TimescaleDB for Ignition or TimescaleDB Enterprise, as well as a fully managed Tiger Cloud option for teams that want Tiger Data to operate the database infrastructure.

Yes. TimescaleDB is built on PostgreSQL, so historian data can live alongside relational operational context in the same database. The architecture supports both relational row storage and optimized storage for high-volume tag history.

There are no tag- or user-based licensing limits. The workload a deployment can support depends on its configuration, ingest rate, retention, query patterns, and availability requirements.

Open-source TimescaleDB remains available, but the purpose-built Enterprise Historian experience is designed around the supported TimescaleDB for Ignition / TimescaleDB Enterprise deployment paths rather than a DIY open-source database configuration.

You can continue using TimescaleDB Community with SQL Historian. Enterprise Historian is a different experience: historian-specific database configuration is integrated into Ignition, and when paired with TimescaleDB Enterprise, the deployment also includes production operations such as high availability, backups, monitoring, and lifecycle management.

The migration approach depends on your existing historian database, data volume, retention requirements, and architecture. If you’re currently using SQL Historian with PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, or another database, talk to us about your environment and the appropriate migration path.

Performance depends on the workload and deployment configuration. Enterprise Historian is designed for high-rate ingest and fast queries across large histories. See the benchmark results above for performance measured using the published test configuration.

Not yet. Request access to the Private Preview and get updates on General Availability of the offering.