About PI Developer Technologies

PI Developer Technologies is a family of products that supports implementation of custom applications that work with the PI System. PI Developer Technologies allow you to integrate PI System data into other applications and business systems, such as these examples:

• Microsoft Office

• Microsoft SQL Server

• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems

• Reporting and analytics platforms

• Web portals

• Geospatial systems

• Maintenance systems

The PI System Access suite covers a wide range of use cases in various environments, programming languages, operating systems, and infrastructures.

Products included with PI Developer Technologies

The following products make up PI Developer Technologies:

• AF SDK

  Provides comprehensive, high-performance, Windows-based .NET programmatic access to the PI System.

  • Offers the best performance of all the PI development technologies.

  • Provides more available methods and options than any other technology.

  • Limited to Windows operating systems that use the .NET Framework.

• PI Web API

  Allows for operating system and device-independent programmatic access to the PI System through a REST API, and is the recommended cross-platform offering for any operating system that can use a modern web browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge.

  • PI Web API is not dependent on a specific operating system or programming language.

  • PI Web API has limited methods and options available compared to the AF SDK.

• PI SQL Framework

  Makes PI Server data available for querying.

  • PI SQL Framework is compatible with other systems that use Structured Query Language (SQL).

  • PI SQL Framework offers limited methods and options compared to the AF SDK (for example, setting security on assets and creating units of measure).

  • PI SQL Framework is limited to read-only PI AF access (but can create and write to tags on your PI System).

There are more ways to access the PI System programmatically; however, the previously-mentioned three products are most commonly used by customers.

Note: Another developer application is Powershell for the PI System. PowerShell cmdlets help with the administration of Data Archive and PI Asset Framework servers. They can be used in a variety of ways to create scripts for commonly needed tasks or for bulk system management operations. See Powershell for PI System for more information.