The Industrial Internet market is targeted to grow by trillions of US dollars by the year 2030, driven by adoption, deployment and integration of billions of intelligent devices and their associated data. This digital expansion faces a number of significant challenges, including reliable data management, security and privacy. Realizing the benefits from this evolution is made more difficult because a typical industrial plant includes multiple vendors and legacy technology stacks. Aggregating all the raw data to a single data center before performing analysis increases response times, raising performance concerns in traditional markets and requiring a compromise between data duplication and data access performance. Similar to the way microservices can integrate disparate information technologies without imposing monolithic cross-cutting architecture impacts, we propose microdatabases to manage the data heterogeneity of the Industrial Internet while allowing records to be captured and secured close to the industrial processes, but also be made available near the applications that can benefit from the data. A microdatabase is an abstraction of a data store that standardizes and protects the interactions between distributed data sources, providers and consumers. It integrates an information model with discoverable object types that can be browsed interactively and programmatically, and supports repository instances that evolve with their own lifecycles. The microdatabase abstraction is independent of technology choice and was designed based on solicitation and review of industry stakeholder concerns.