We use process historians, and it's unlikely we will ever get off them. Industrial process historians are hard to replace because of the multitude of corner conditions that they handle, a result of being hardened over 3-4 decades of being deployed in industry.
That said, most process historians are really not optimized for analytics use cases, which are becoming increasingly important for extracting value. They also don't scale too well horizontally, and are unwieldy to work with on the large. (typically they're used for visualization, and you are typically only able to work with small subsets of the data at a time, like when you're troubleshooting operations at a particular plant, as opposed to finding patterns across all plants which is more easily achieved with something like Timescale).
I think an ideal setup for me would be to get historian collectors to tee their data to both the historian database, and to something like Timescale. I do a lot of large scale time-series modeling and would really prefer to work with a SQL database than a historian API.
That said, most process historians are really not optimized for analytics use cases, which are becoming increasingly important for extracting value. They also don't scale too well horizontally, and are unwieldy to work with on the large. (typically they're used for visualization, and you are typically only able to work with small subsets of the data at a time, like when you're troubleshooting operations at a particular plant, as opposed to finding patterns across all plants which is more easily achieved with something like Timescale).
I think an ideal setup for me would be to get historian collectors to tee their data to both the historian database, and to something like Timescale. I do a lot of large scale time-series modeling and would really prefer to work with a SQL database than a historian API.