European Robotics Leader Successfully Deploys with ITTIA DB SQL

The incomparable Cow Master is manufactured by a leading European specialist in industrial automation with robotic-feeding systems. Cow Master is an embedded system that uses robotics to manage animal healthcare, including automatic matching of cow feeding patterns and continuous management of feed concentration to stimulate the appetite of cows. The robotic Cow Master systems are programmed to deliver a specific amount of nutrition to a designated feeding area, to encourage cows to eat a healthier diet. Cow Master has been recognized as the leading industrial animal healthcare systems in livestock feeding systems. The key component in this state-of-the-art system lies is its embedded data managed by ITTIA DB SQL, which has led to a dramatic improvement in animal healthcare.

Selection, design and implementation of a database for Cow Master, with its user friendly human-to-machine interface for robots and industrial automation systems, was a difficult challenge. But certain characteristics of ITTIA DB SQL made the selection easy. Some of these features are:

Performance

ITTIA DB SQL significantly outperforms other available solution in write throughput, boasting insert and update performance that is, respectively, ten and fifty times faster on flash media comparing to similar technologies. Combined undo/redo logging protects data from unexpected power failure with minimal I/O between transactions. This results in excellent performance and safe transactions.

Concurrency

ITTIA DB SQL is built and designed for multi-threaded, multi-user application development. Cow Master embedded with ITTIA DB SQL can run transactions in parallel, allowing long-running tasks such as synchronization to run without blocking normal operations. Both multi-threaded and client/server concurrency are supported.

High Availability

Cow Master can protect mission-critical data with ITTIA DB SQL replication, which automatically distributes data so that failure of one component does not threaten the entire system. ITTIA DB SQL offers the choice of recording changes in a replication log to be exchanged asynchronously, or applying updates immediately with two-phase commit.

Complex SQL Queries

Cow Master collects a large amount of data accumulated over a long range of time. Cow Master utilizes complex SQL queries to summarize this information for end users.
Cow Master introduces a high demand for big data management on robotic devices that would have been stand-alone in previous hardware generations. Now, Cow Master is able to offer its embedded data to become part of a networked and connected animal healthcare ecosystem, as the complexity of data management and system connectivity is solved by ITTIA DB SQL. This allows end users of Cow Master to find and query required data and configure data distribution to replicate between devices.

Huge Amount of Data Management

Cow Master is composed of many robots and devices that divide up a big data problem. Some data is private to each device, while other data is shared with select peers. ITTIA DB SQL uses replication and synchronization to efficiently distribute local data with other devices and back-end databases according to the application's business logic and policies. Any number of peers can participate in replication, allowing an ecosystem to scale up as more devices are added.

ITTIA DB SQL is designed to function within one or more machines. Though battery backup is employed by these robotic devices, it also protects critical data in case of a sudden power failure. ITTIA DB SQL protects, organizes, and shares data between the many tasks and devices that make up a complete system, and offers the best conditions for rational software development with the highest standards of quality for human-to-machine products. It supports both low-level functions for accessing data without SQL or with SQL for using queries. With cross-platform support and optimization for both flash media and in-memory storage, ITTIA DB SQL is able to efficiently enhance the data management capabilities of industrial automation robots.