I'm running reviews on Open Exchange since April 2021.
I have seen excellent packages, good ones, and some that made me feel just lost.
And I started to recognize contributors also by their style and organization of the submitted packages.

Pouring The Coffee: Creating and scheduling a task

Don't you wish a fresh, hot cup of coffee could be waiting for you right when you get into the office? Let's automate that!

Cache and IRIS come with a built-in Task Manager, which should have a familiar feel to those used to using the Windows task scheduler or using cron on Linux. Your user account will need access to the %Admin_Task resource to use it, and you can access it in the management portal under System Operation -> Task Manager. When first installed, there are roughly 20 types of task that you can schedule.

I have just created a new Global Master Topic, "IRIS Cheatsheets". IRIS has introduced a lot of new functionality, especially in scripting languages, FHIR R4 support, enhanced Interoperability Tools, and IRIS Analytics. Having spent 35 years working on Windows-based PC's and Laptops, I have surprisingly little knowledge of Linux, Docker and Git. Furthermore, I have written almost every application and Interface in ObjectScript with splatterings of SQL, .Net, and Java Gateways and the most basic knowledge of WinSCP, Putty, SSH. All that changed when I received my first Raspberry Pi.

Working in support, I usually get asked how many days I should keep journals. Should it be two days or after two backups? More? Less? Why two?

The correct answer (for most of the environments) is that you should keep the journals since the last validated Backup. I.e., until you don't check if a Backup is valid (restoring the file and checking with the Integrity utility), you can't be sure there is a good copy of your data and can't purge the journals safely.

InterSystems technologies are renowned for their high performing databases, which support the systems and operations of many organisations. However a key ingredient to this success is the quality and maintainability of their code.

The quality of code can impact everything from speed and ease of fixing bugs and making enhancements, to the overall performance of your organization and your ability to get ahead in the marketplace.

By ensuring your code is maintainable, you can reduce approximately 75% of the systems life cycle costs*. This is why, at George James Software, the solutions we build are always straightforward and written in high quality code - because we know that this solid foundation can positively impact the rest of your organization.

With a maintainable system you're able to reduce your overall maintenance as any issues that occur are significantly faster to identify and fix. This means you're free to allocate that time and budget to enhancements, enabling you to get the most value out of your applications and ultimately better support your organization.

Keep an eye out for our next few posts about what a maintainable system looks like and the tools that can help you keep your code maintainable, in order to help you to reduce those maintenance costs.

The TOGAF is the The Open Group Architecture Framework. It provides an approach for planning, design, implement, deploy and govern your EA (Enterprise Architecture) projects.

The TOGAF has a concept called Building Block. It is any element that can be used, reused a executed to deliver value and new functions to the business.

In the picture above, I present to you the main IRIS building blocks to create fantastic apps.

In my previous article I demonstrated the steps to connect to Caché from Appeon PowerBuilder by using ODBC.
In this article I will demonstrated how to Retrieve data from Caché with Appeon PowerBuilder (https://www.appeon.com/products/powerbuilder) by using ODBC

Hi community!

I want to introduce you a new powerful feature from our static code analyzer objectscriptQuality.

Each time a new IRIS version is released, you need to prepare a roadmap for migration in which you need to spend a lot of time on testing to find where your code is not accomplishing with the newer version. Or maybe you need your code to be compatible with multiple IRIS or Caché versions.

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you don't get notified by OEX only on YOUR package.
​​​So @Evgeny Shvarov suggested publishing my monthly summary of my reviews here in DC.
It reflects my experience with the status I found at the time of my review.

In this article, we will run an InterSystems IRIS cluster using docker and Merge CPF files - a new feature allowing you to configure servers with ease.

On UNIX® and Linux, you can modify the default iris.cpf using a declarative CPF merge file. A merge file is a partial CPF that sets the desired values for any number of parameters upon instance startup. The CPF merge operation works only once for each instance.

Our cluster architecture is very simple, it would consist of one Node1 (master node) and two Data Nodes (check all available roles). Unfortunately, docker-compose cannot deploy to several servers (although it can deploy to remote hosts), so this is useful for local development of sharding-aware data models, tests, and such. For a productive InterSystems IRIS Cluster deployment, you should use either ICM or IKO.

Hey community, how are you doing?

How do you exercise your creativity? How do you test new ideas?

Over the years I have always thought about creating new things, modifying existing ones, experimenting, testing, breaking (it always happens), building again, starting over.

In the last years the data architecture and platforms focused into Big Data repositories and how toprocess it to deliver business value. From this effort many technologies were created to process tera and petabytes of data, see:

I work as an Integration Engineer for United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). I work on a Health Connect production which processes many RecordMap files. I do not fully understand RecordMaps and I wanted to develop an application for the Interoperability contest where I could learn more about working with RecordMaps. I browsed InterSystems documentation for inspiration on how to start. I was happy to find CSV Record Wizard.