Thirteen years ago, I attained dual undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and math, then promptly started full-time at InterSystems using neither. One of my most memorable and stomach-churning academic experiences was in Stats II. On an exam, I was solving a moderately difficult confidence interval problem. I was running out of time, so (being an engineer) I wrote out the definite integral on the exam paper, punched it into my graphing calculator, wrote an arrow with “calculator” over it, then wrote the result.

I have a new project to store information from REST responses into an IRIS database. I’ll need to sync information from at least two dozen separate REST endpoints, which means creating nearly that many ObjectScript classes to store the results from those endpoints.

Prefer not to read? Check out the demo video I created:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-OwOAHC5b3s
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

The InterSystems IRIS is a great data platform and it is met the current features required by the market. In this article, you see the top 10:

Note: this list was updated because many features are added to IRIS in last 3 years (thanks @Kristina Lauer)

Who hasn't been developing a beautiful example using a Docker IRIS image and had the image generation process fail in the Dockerfile because the license under which the image was created doesn't contain certain privileges?

In my case, what I was deploying in Docker is a small application that uses the Vector data type. With the Community version, this isn't a problem because it already includes Vector Search and vector storage. However, when I changed the IRIS image to a conventional IRIS (the latest-cd), I found that when I built the image, including the classes it had generated, it returned this error:

Surely you wanted to use the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) JSON you used for your spec class on the iris-web-swagger-ui iris package. The generated OAS from the ##class(%REST.API).GetWebRESTApplication(...) method is very crude, with no description on the parameters or the expected response structure.

So after creating your REST application from an OAS you should have:

An experiment on how to use the LangChain framework, IRIS Vector Search, and LLMs to generate IRIS-compatible SQL from user prompts.

This article was based in this notebook. You can run it with a ready to use environment with this application in OpenExchange.

Setup

First, we need to install the necessary libraries:

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

Hi, colleagues!

As you can see the new topic of the programming contest - AI Agents.

The topic was over-hyped recently on the Internet and has different meanings. You might get curious about what we mean by AI agents in regard to the InterSystems programming contest.

Hi Community,

I would like to present my last package OpenAPI-Suite, this is a set of tools to generate ObjectScript code from an OpenAPI specification version 3.0. In short, these packages allow to:

• Generate server-side class. It’s pretty similar to the generated code by ^%REST but the added value is the version 3.0 support.
• Generate HTTP client classes.
• Generate client production (business services, business operation, business process, Ens.Request, Ens.Response) classes.
• A web interface to generate and download the code or generate and compile directly on the server.
• Convert specification from version 1.x, 2.x to version 3.0.

Migrating InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health from on-premises to the cloud offers many advantages for Application Providers and Solution Providers. These advantages include simplified operations, access to flexible resources, and enhanced resilience. Companies no longer need to worry about the physical constraints and expenses associated with maintaining on-prem infrastructure, such as power and space requirements and expensive computer hardware.

One of the most compelling benefits is the ability to accelerate speed to market. By removing the burden of infrastructure maintenance, cloud environments enable faster development and deployment cycles, allowing businesses to respond quickly to market demands and opportunities. Operational costs are also lowered, because companies can scale resources up or down based on actual needs, leading to more efficient use of capital. Moreover, migrating to the cloud can contribute to a reduced carbon footprint by optimizing energy usage through shared cloud infrastructure.

Transitioning to the cloud may involve significant changes. Companies may benefit from a more operational focus, managing and optimizing cloud resources continuously. This shift may require changes to business models, reconsideration of margins, and strategies for scaling operations up or out. While requiring more investment, embracing these changes can lead to improved agility and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Hi Community,

Traditional keyword-based search struggles with nuanced, domain-specific queries. Vector search, however, leverages semantic understanding, enabling AI agents to retrieve and generate responses based on context—not just keywords.

This article provides a step-by-step guide to creating an Agentic AI RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) application.

Implementation Steps:

1. Create Agent Tools
   • Add Ingest functionality: Automatically ingests and index documents (e.g., InterSystems IRIS 2025.1 Release Notes).
   • Implement Vector Search Functionality
2. Create Vector Search Agent
3. Handoff to Triage (Main Agent)
4. Run The Agent

What I find really useful about IRIS when teaching my subject of Postrelational databases is the fact that it is a multi model database. Which means that I can actually go into architecture and structure and all that only once but then show the usage of different models (like object, document, hierarchy) using the same language and approach. And it is not a huge leap to go from an object oriented programming language (like C#, Java etc) to an object oriented database.

However, along with advantages (which are many) come some drawbacks when we switch from object oriented model to relational. When I say that you can get access to the same data using different models I need to also explain how it is possible to work with lists and arrays from object model in relational table. With arrays it is very simple - by default they are represented as separate tables and that's the end of it. With lists - it's harder because by default it's a string. But one still wants to do something about it without damaging the structure and making this list unreadable in the object model.

So in this article I will showcase a couple of predicates and a function that are useful when working with lists, and not just as fields.

The "Ask Developer Community AI" tool is an excellent resource for studying for the certification. I asked it about each topic that will be covered in the test and the results are below.
Note: I classified each answer by the assertiveness that I consider as good, average and bad.

Note 2: The article has 4 parts, each one for an exam area.