One hurdle many companies experience when moving to ACC is the loss of a direct database connection. When companies have heavily invested in reporting on the data in Plant 3d, not having direct query access to the data will create disconnects that were previously solved. Fortunately we can solve this problem with some api access and infrastructure.
Here are two potential workflows, one cloud based and one based on the local network.
In both scenarios, we need a user who has access to the project hosted in ACC.
Documentation: https://pipinglabs.com/documentation/project-mirroring/
In scenario one, the Plant 3d database will be temporarily stored on a machine inside of AWS, and then the data itself will be pushed to SQL Server instance in AWS. This scenario makes it easier for integrating into a data lake where the data can be pushed out to global consumers.
In scenario two, a company user will user their machine as a project storage, and the Piping Labs BI application will do the data mirroring to a SQL Server instance on their local network.
A couple minor points of clarification. Since each Plant 3d project has 5 databases, we currently push to a SQL instance. Thus we need dbcreator rights to create the multiple databases.
Because we are pulling the data from ACC, the data in the SQL Server instance is essentially read-only and ACC remains the master. Thus, the mirroring process will sever connections and delete existing data so that the databases may be over-written to update.
Please contact us if you are interested in optimizing your Plant 3d data workflows with this feature!