We are two university students doing an internship at a company that currently uses a Proficy Historian database for storing real-time data. Our assignment is to develop a web application to visualize this data in a more attractive and clear way. This means we need to access the central database to obtain this data. As indicated, the database is a Proficy Historian 3.0 database running on a server. We found several results on using the SDK or OLE DB, but it was very unclear whether this actually would work and whether this was efficient. We have no experience whatsoever in Visual Basic (which seems to be a requirement for the use of OLE DB) and would much prefer to implement the data queries in PHP directly. Do you have any suggestions as to how we could best achieve this?
php should probably work if it supports ADO, and you can use the samples to see how to make an ADO connection in VB to see what ADO properties, methods and objects we normally use.
Saying this, it sounds as if you might benefit from talking with your local rep on different design approaches as there's a variety of good existing client tools that visualize Historian data without custom code (e.g. Proficy Portal), and even if ultimately a coded solution is required there may be other alternatives to consdider (eg SQL Reporting Services might be another option).
I would also suggest moving up to the latest version of Historian v4.5 as it will give access to the .Net Client Access API and may give you more options than the 3.0 SDK and OLEDB.