Globals, these magic swords for storing data, have been around for a while, but not many people can use them efficiently or know about this super-weapon altogether.

If you use globals for tasks where they truly shine, the results may be amazing, either in terms of increased performance or dramatic simplification of the overall solution (1, 2).

Globals offer a special way of storing and processing data, which is completely different from SQL tables. They were first introduced in 1966 in the M(UMPS) programming language, which was initially used in medical databases. It is still used in the same way, but has also been adopted by some other industries where reliability and high performance are top priorities: finance, trading, etc.

Later M(UMPS) evolved into Caché ObjectScript (COS). COS was developed by InterSystems as a superset of M. The original language is still accepted by developers' community and alive in a few implementations. There are several signs of activity around the web: MUMPS Google group, Mumps User's group), effective ISO Standard, etc.

Modern global based DBMS supports transactions, journaling, replication, partitioning. It means that they can be used for building modern, reliable and fast distributed systems.

Globals do not restrict you to the boundaries of the relational model. They give you the freedom of creating data structures optimized for particular tasks. For many applications reasonable use of globals can be a real silver bullet offering speeds that developers of conventional relational applications can only dream of.

Globals as a method of storing data can be used in many modern programming languages, both high- and low-level. Therefore, this article will focus specifically on globals and not the language they once came from.

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Some weeks ago, I was reading a book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design. At a certain point, trying to define why do we exist? , why do we use the models we use in physics?, ...those kind of things you know... they pointed at the Game of Life example invented by the mathematician John Coward in 1970... Basically he wanted to show that a system with really basic fundamental laws (Physics) could evolve and "live" to become a more complex system (Chemistry) in which "something" (humans) could work out its own model and complex rules to explain its reality… the rules for this deterministic model that he exposed were so basic that I thought it could be funny to implement them in ObjectScript when I had some spare time... there are others implementations in JavaScript and other languages... but not in ObjectScript... and that had to be corrected!!… so here you are!

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Article
Timothy Leavitt · Mar 17, 2021 3m read
Making the most of $Query

I ran into an interesting ObjectScript use case today with a general solution that I wanted to share.

Use case:

I have a JSON array (specifically, in my case, an array of issues from Jira) that I want to aggregate over a few fields - say, category, priority, and issue type. I then want to flatten the aggregates into a simple list with the total for each of the groups. Of course, for the aggregation, it makes sense to use a local array in the form:

agg(category, priority, type) = total

Such that for each record in the input array I can just:

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This is the second article in a series on iKnow demo applications, showcasing how the concepts and context provided through iKnow's unique bottom-up approach can be used to implement relevant use cases and help users be more productive in their daily tasks. Last week's article discussed the Knowledge Portal, a straightforward tool to browse iKnow indexing results.

This week, we'll look into the Set Analysis demo, a slightly more advanced application where you'll be using the concepts identified by iKnow to organize your content into sets of documents. The original version of this demo was developed by Danny Wijnschenk & Alain Houf for an academy session at GS2015, but the app has evolved significantly since then.

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Article
Igor Titarenko · Sep 10, 2020 3m read
How To Create "Write-Only" Code

One of the leading benefits of ObjectScript is the speed and efficiency it allows for an experienced developer. Let's look at an example of how you can benefit from ObjectScript today.

Suppose you have a class that stores the names of your users. We'll call the class Data.User, and give it a string property Name. Next, we will need a method to create a new user or update an existing one. A naive, simplistic approach might look like this example:

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This is the third post of a series explaining how to create an end-to-end Machine Learning system.

Training a Machine Learning Model

When you work with machine learning is common to hear this work: training. Do you what training mean in a ML Pipeline?
Training could mean all the development process of a machine learning model OR the specific point in all development process
that uses training data and results in a machine learning model.

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Hello,

This package may be of interest...

Link: https://github.com/litesolutions/cachedb-import

I have programmed this over a hunch, in order to facilitate the retrieval of source code from a Caché installation. It makes use of the Java API provided by Caché.

Right now, I use it as a means to salvage sources in order to analyze them using the SonarQube plugin I develop for my employer. Unfortunately this plugin is not open source.

I am calling for help here, on two fronts:

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In the last post we scheduled 24-hour collections of performance metrics using pButtons. In this post we are going to be looking at a few of the key metrics that are being collected and how they relate to the underlying system hardware. We will also start to explore the relationship between Caché (or any of the InterSystems Data Platforms) metrics and system metrics. And how you can use these metrics to understand the daily beat rate of your systems and diagnose performance problems.

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Article
David Reche · Dec 22, 2015 1m read
Sign and verify in SMIME format

In some project, I found the need to use SMIME format https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3851.txt, basically is an standard used to wrap a message together with its signature using a certificate (usually X509). Ensemble don't have a single class to do that but inside the Ensemble installation we have the openssl utility, so in this example I use the "openssl smime" command to sign or verify a message.

The example has two Business Process that able to sign or verify and in order to test I made a simple production.

Hope this helps

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This week I am going to look at CPU, one of the primary hardware food groups :) A customer asked me to advise on the following scenario; Their production servers are approaching end of life and its time for a hardware refresh. They are also thinking of consolidating servers by virtualising and want to right-size capacity either bare-metal or virtualized. Today we will look at CPU, in later posts I will explain the approach for right-sizing other key food groups - memory and IO.

So the questions are:

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Article
Evgeny Shvarov · Mar 31, 2018 1m read
What Are You Using For Issue Tracking?

Hi, Community!

What is your favorite issue tracking system for projects with InterSystems Data Platform? What did you use and what are you using now?

In projects with InterSystems Data Platform, I worked with Redmine, JIRA, Trello. A lot of code versioning systems now have this feature too (Gitlab, Github).

Now my favorite for small and medium projects is Github, because it is simple, is very close to code (commit-issue linkage) and it has kanban).

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InterSystems IRIS currently limits classes to 999 properties.

But what to do if you need to store more data per object?

This article would answer this question (with the additional cameo of Community Python Gateway and how you can transfer wide datasets into Python).

The answer is very simple actually - InterSystems IRIS currently limits classes to 999 properties, but not to 999 primitives. The property in InterSystems IRIS can be an object with 999 properties and so on - the limit can be easily disregarded.

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Developing a Full-Stack JavaScript web app with Caché requires you to bring together the right building blocks. In the previous part, we created a basic front-end React application. In the second part of this article series I will show how to choose the right back-end technology for your application. You will see Caché allows you to use many different approaches to link your front-end to your Caché server, depending on your application's needs. In this part we will set up a back-end with Node.js/QEWD and CSP/REST. In the next part we will enhance our basic web app and connect it to Caché using these technologies.

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