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Piping Labs BI 1.0.122

Many companies struggle with getting their Plant 3D bases out of the ACC environment once they start using Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro. From the build versions, you can tell that we’ve been working to solve this problem for a little while. The database mirror tool uses a local workstation (virtual or otherwise) to connect to your Plant 3d Collaboration project and then convert the SQLite databases to SQL Server on a regular schedule.

Having the data at your fingertips allows you to utilize SQL Server reporting services, or Power BI as needed.

This version (1.0.122) adds a couple new things. We want to make accessing the Plant 3d data easy and ideally put the data back in the cloud. To facilitate testing in AWS, we added a merge feature and we now support logging in with SQL Server Authentication. They’re a couple little changes, but they allow for some new potential.

First, instead of setting up and maintaining 5 databases per project, the project is in one database. We do this by appending the project type to the table name, like PnPProject_PnId, PnPProject_Piping, and so on.

Second, while Windows authentication is the best security path, it can be very complicated to setup a hybrid environment. Adding SQL Auth makes it easier to test and rollout. Don’t worry we’ve encrypted passwords. While that may deter casual password stealing, overall security is still dependent on how your implement security between the cloud and your network.

The Merge databases has been added as a toggle switch, and an authentication type drop down has been added to the UI.

When you choose the merge database option, here’s what the new structure will look like:

If you’re thinking “That’s nice, but why should I care?”, the answer is that in the next couple weeks, we’ll be adding our Power BI dashboard to the Piping Labs Enterprise offering. The dashboard has already been configured to help you identify and validate missing tagged items, and it’s setup to use the merged database format. Stay posted for news about the Power BI Dashboard. Here’s a reminder of the preview, and we look forward to helping you maximize the way you use data from Plant 3D!

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