1. A data compression and storage facility that operates upon a stream of data points received from a data source in a control environment, to reduce the volume of data points that are stored in a database, wherein each data point specifies a value and timestamp, by discarding received data points that do not significantly depart from a signal trend established by a sequence of received data points from the streaming time stamped data source, the database server compression facility comprising: a compression test sequence applied, upon receiving a new data point, to at least the received new data point, a held over data point and a last data point stored in the database; and a time override that forces storing a candidate data point without regard to whether the candidate point would be stored as a result of applying the compression test sequence, upon receiving the new data point.