Have used almost everything except Archie's one and will give that a go now it has an Omron driver.
It depends what you require - I would say to you that if trending and graphing is the most important requirement I would use Citect - now known as Vijeo Citect.
In my view it has the very best trending capabilities of any SCADA system and the best built in trend display pages.
You can also use a trigger to start and stop trending when something is running or not and the trend files are really quite tiny an efficient - you do not need massive hard drives to say trend 100 odd values for 12 months. I had a job where I was trending 700 values for a 12 month period - some as often as far less than 1 second scan (frequency every 100ms) in a power station. I think the drive was only 500 meg and it never filled up.
I have not looked at another SCADA system for a job for years now and some of the others may have improved with respect to trending.
I hear Ignition is pretty good but have not looked at trending with it or the size of the files - I have had a look at the whole application and it looks pretty good.
By the way, Schneider seem to be buying most of the bid SCADA manufacturers - there have been several lately. From past history they will be Schneiderised or dropped leaving people in the poo! I doubt they will ever drop Citect due to the huge user base in Australia and elsewhere in the world but who knows. They have a very good SCADA system from Canada that is designed for remote I/O (RTU) applications as well and seem to be pushing that very hard into the market place. I find it not very intuitive though.
FIX 32 was the last time I used FIX - not impressed with a few exceptions. There are a few things in FIX that I would like to see in every SCADA system from a programmers point of view but far too many things I did not like.
By the way, Citect supports SQL. Citect was also used for the biggest SCADA system in the world - Olympic Dam in Oz. I think the last count was 1.25 million tags - Citect dials out to remotes - remotes dial in to Citect - every posible configuration taken care of. The overall scan time for the system with that many tags was less than 2 seconds - pretty impressive for 10-15 years ago! I hear there has been more added and if the extension goes ahead there will be heaps more. There are a LOT of redundant servers! Not where you are of course, or most of us, but interesting none the less.
Hope this helps.
By the way, I have been programming Citect, and will be on and off for the next 3-5 years, at Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in Canberra for CSIRO/NASA. They are most impressed with the improved trending capabilities.
