Project documentation
MkDocs

The project documentation in Eliona for administrators is created fully in MKDocs and is available in machine-readable Markdown.

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API documentation
swagger framework

We employ swagger framework for the interface description. It provides all the interface descriptions in a language-neutral and machine-readable fashion in JSON or YAML. We create individual API solutions for customer-specific API requirements.

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Eliona
System architecture

Eliona Edge Node technology

Flexible and endlessly scalable

Eliona Edge Nodes act as data concentrators and offer gateway functionalities for the targeted forwarding of data in a cluster network.

Free hardware selection for the edge nodes ensures manufacturer independence.

From a functional perspective, the Eliona Edge Node to the cloud represents a real-time big data cluster that exchanges encrypted data via an SSL or TLS certificate.

Specific data communication with the subsystem takes place with data buffering in the Edge Node. The scaling range at the Edge Node is unlimited.

Analysis

Efficient evaluation of large amounts of data to optimize operational performance and a qualitative overview of the systems.

BIM

104/5000Import of complete 3D models via the BIM exchange format IFC for a simple overview of all assets.

API

All data and functions can also be accessed and processed via our RESTful API.

PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB

Why we utilize PostreSQL and not NoSQL or time series databases

Most development teams, including our own Eliona developers, work in the smart building provider sector collecting, organizing and analyzing large sets of data, called big data. For reasons of performance, this huge flood of times series data is often stored in a NoSQL database and the meta-data in a relational database. Almost all IoT platforms use NoSQL databases. Needless to say, each of these databases works differently; however, using a polyglot database architecture increases operational and application complexity. For Eliona, we do without a NoSQL database, with no drop in performance, thereby eliminating highly complex operational issues and the challenges that configuration brings.   

To guarantee the excellent scalability of the data acquisition rates (time series) and to be able to keep all meta-data in one database, we utilize PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB. It is even possible to write time series and meta-data at the same time and achieve enormous data throughput. 120,000 data series a second with a database of gigantic proportions. In fact, you could write the entire energy data of the whole of Switzerland in Eliona in roughly one minute.   

But let us go back and take a look at what IoT/smart building projects actually focus on: Collecting, analyzing and responding to data in order to improve benefits/efficiency, reduce downtime/waste and to provide better services. In other words, we need more than just a database: We also require a simple way to harvest actionable insights from the data. And this is where SQL comes into play. Although it has been fashionable in recent years to denounce SQL and praise NoSQL, SQL is actually extremely powerful.

Advantages of PostgreSQL

Boasts more than 30 years of active development
Open Source
Many add-ons, plug-ins and extensions
Web services such as RESTful
Complex WHERE predicates (supported by secondary indices)
Aggregate functions and orders; window functions, libraries with sets of mathematical and statistical functions, etc.
All GEO information – which is important for localization and tracking – is provided via PostGIS

 
If the standard performance of PostgreSQL needs to be increased (from 100,000 transactions per second), there is a PostgreSQL further development called «TimescaleDB», which can easily compete with InfluxDB.