National Instruments Announces New Tools for Creating Custom Data Management Applications in LabVIEW

Aug. 19, 2009 – National Instruments (Nasdaq: NATI) has announced the release of the NI LabVIEW DataFinder Toolkit, an extension of the LabVIEW graphical system design platform that helps engineers and scientists search and find valued data faster. Engineers and scientists worldwide have adopted LabVIEW because of the ease of use of graphical programming as well as the performance it delivers. The toolkit further enhances LabVIEW by adding an Internet-like search functionality that indexes and stores the properties of time-based measurement files, making the process of finding data of interest more efficient than the traditional approach of loading all files into memory and manually scanning the results. The toolkit can also be combined with NI DataFinder Server Edition to extend the same search technology to servers so large groups or departments can easily share or analyse their data.

As more high-speed measurement devices, including RF instruments, digitisers and data acquisition, are integrated into test systems, engineers and scientists face larger amounts of data than ever before. When analysing data, they traditionally must cull through millions of data points to find the results they need, which can be a timely and tedious process. The typical solution was to purchase high-cost data management packages or hire a database consultant to manage these mass amounts of data.