Couple of questions as I am preparing to work on a new project. Two main areas of the plant so I'm planning on a separate tag provider for each.
Question 1: What do you all do with the default tag provider usually at this point?
Do you leave it and just add two new tag providers or do you rename default tag provider to what you want?
If you leave it does it have any value (i.e. are there certain things that it would work good for?)
Question 2: If I have a tag provider for each area of the plant, do I generally want a separate db in SQL for all the associated db stuff (history, alarms, whatnot)?
So Id' have two db connections, one for each provider at this point? What are the pros/cons there?
Thanks much just looking for some insight/best practice type info as I get better at this!
There is nothing wrong with leaving it there, or renaming, or using it. It is just a repository of tags. We have multiple sites so each site has its own tag provider allocated to them. A single project can access all those tag providers if necessary. Just because you can assign a default tag provider to a project doesn't mean it is locked in to that. It just helps when dealing with tag paths and knowing where to find the tag. But you should try to leverage fully qualified tag paths if your project deals with multiple tag providers. If you only have 1 site and 1 project, maybe default is all you need (Edge edition is a good example of just leveraging only a single tag provider).
If the areas of your plant are unique enough and want to create that separation either logically or by security or for scalability, then by all means you can create multiple databases/schemas. Depending on your plant, maybe those areas are different business units with separate budgets. Maybe one day on side may want to spin up their own system. Having separate database connections could facilitate the migration without impacting your site. The key here is that you have the flexibility to do all of that.
As for performance implications, others may want to chime in on that.
I generally do not make multiple tag providers. Mainly because they cannot share UDT definitions, but also because it complicates gateway network data sharing.