How are we doing THIS year versus the same period LAST year?
This is a common need in Business Intelligence. In fact, many design specifications for reports make use of a comparison between a selected period (year, quarter, etc) up to a certain date (for example November 15th, 2016) and a summary of the same information for the previous year (i.e. up to November 15th, 2015).
This post shows how to implement this in DeepSee.

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I am pleased to announce the field test of Caché and Ensemble 2016.3 - with many new improvements.

The product team at InterSystems looks forward to your participation in the field test and feedback over the coming months.

Some of the more signification changes in 2016.3 are new RESTful APIs for iKnow and broader APIs for programmatic control of multiple servers (enterprise manager). As always, there are a host of scalability and performance improvements, including improvements to the core database and SQL. And hundreds of smaller improvements and corrections.

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Article
· Jun 21, 2016 1m read
Simple Cache systemd Unit

Hello

I have noticed that Cache (2016.1 at the time of writing) doesn't come with a systemd startup script for RHEL7.

Here is a small example script I have built.

[Unit]
Description=Intersystems Cache

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c '/usr/cachesys/cstart 2>&1 | logger -t cache_start'
ExecStop=/bin/bash -c '/usr/cachesys/cstop quietly 2>&1 | logger -t cache_stop'
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The file should be placed as /usr/lib/systemd/system/cache.service

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Article
· Oct 4, 2016 1m read
How to Parse a URL in Caché

How to parse a URL in Caché:

Let's pretend you are working on a project where you may be retrieving a URL for some purpose and you have the need to be easily able to parse apart that URL to get the various components that make up the URL.

Here's how to do that:

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Article
· Mar 10, 2016 2m read
New Book, Caché and MUMPS – Part II

New Book, Caché and MUMPS – Part II

By Paul Mike Kadow

Edited by Deborah Graham and John J. Mitchell

Go to http://cosmumps.org for a download of just the examples of the book and the table of contents.

From the Forward

InterSystems, from a humble beginning, has grown into a worldwide company with its flagship product, Caché, leading the way.

First, this book chronicles and explores some of the many areas InterSystems has grown into and has influenced over the years.

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Article
· Jun 24, 2016 2m read
Atelier, Git, and GitHub

One of the benefits of Atelier is easy integration with source code management tools. Some Eclipse installations include the EGit plugin, or you can install it from the Eclipse marketplace. EGIt makes integration with Git and GitHub easy. Here are the steps I used to connect Atelier to a GitHub repository:

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While testing Atelier 1.0.255 I noticed that the namespace subtree of my Atelier project used different icon shading for the top-level Classes folder compared with the top-level Routines one:

Drilling down into parts of the Wasabi package helped me work out the significance of white-filled icons versus brown-filled ones:

A package is white if there are no classes in it, but only subpackages.

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Article
· Jun 13, 2016 1m read
Debug: using locks for breakpoints

Hi, Community!

Want to share with you one debugging approach from the Russian forum.

Suppose I want to debug the application and I want it to stop the execution on a particular line.

I add in code this line:

l +d,-d

When I want to start debugging in this line I block d in terminal

USER> l +d

And execute the app.

The app stops on this line and lets me connect to it with Studio debugger.

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The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (4 of 3)

The forth in the trilogy, anyone a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan?

If you are looking to breathe new life into an old MUMPS application follow these steps to map your globals to classes and expose all that beautiful data to Objects and SQL.

If the above does not sound familiar to you please start at the beginning with the following:

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (1 of 3)

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One of the topics that comes up often when managing Ensemble productions is disk space:

The database (the CACHE.DAT file) grows in a rate that was unexpected; or the Journal files build up at a fast pace; or the database grows continuously though the system has a scheduled purge of the Ensemble runtime data.

It would have been better if these kind of phenomena would have been observed and accounted for yet at the development and testing stage rather than on a live system.

For this purpose I created a basic framework that could aid in this task.

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Article
· Mar 4, 2016 1m read
Getting my head around a class model

There's plenty of goodness in the %-packages InterSystems supplies, and it seems that every new version of Caché brings something new. The browser-based class documentation (a.k.a. Documatic) generally provides a good level of information, but on the basis that "a picture is worth a thousand words" I sometimes want a diagram.

For example, when trying to navigate the %Dictionary package for a project that needed to find out about class definitions, here's one of the UML class diagrams I created.

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Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky.

In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles.

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Article
· Aug 13, 2016 3m read
NewBie's Corner Session 17 New command

NewBie's Corner Session 17 New command

Welcome to NewBie's Corner, a weekly or biweekly post covering basic Caché Material.

New command

The New command limits a variable's scope or range of use. In theory the New command is simple, in reality the New command is powerful and needs to be respected and understood. In Caché ObjectScript and MUMPS an entire chapter is devoted to it.

There are three variations of the New command:

When used without variables

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When using Studio, ODBC or a terminal connection to Caché or Ensemble, you may have wondered how to secure the connection. One option is to add TLS (aka SSL) to your connection. The Caché client applications - TELNET, ODBC and Studio - all understand how to add TLS to the connection. They just need to be configured to do it.

Configuring these clients is easier in 2015.1 and later. I'm going to be discussing this new method. If you're already using the old, legacy method, it will continue to work, but I would recommend you consider switching to the new one.

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Those of you, who work with DeepSee, might have spotted, that when working with a date hierarchy, there are several functions, allowing you to select a time function for a given level. E.g. for extracting a year from a date/time property when building date hierarchy, you simply use Year function. similarly for month number, quarter and so on. Sometimes, you may wish to see the time - namely hour numbers. For this there is a HourNumber function available with DeepSee. Unfortunately, this function converts time into 12 hours format suffixed with AM/PM to indicate day part.

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Article
· May 20, 2016 12m read
Collations in Caché

Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)

Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale.
Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).

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I wanted to share a little tidbit which is in the Studio documentation (http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20152/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?...) but many people who have been using the InterSystems Studio for a long time missed the addition of this *very* useful feature, and every time I mention this to an audience I see at least one face light up because of how excited they are to learn about it!

Within Studio, the Output pane (View -> Output) is actually misnamed. It is actually an Input/Output window which can be used to run Caché ObjectScript commands!

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management.

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Article
· Jul 18, 2016 15m read
Remote proxy objects via dynamic dispatch

This article created as side effect of preparations to the longer set of articles about simple, but still handy MapReduce implementation in Caché. I was looking for relatively easy way to pass arguments to (potentially) multiple targets via remote calling facilities. And after several attempts I have realized that we do have very powerful mechanism in the Caché ObjectScript which might be of particular help here – dynamic dispatch for methods and properties.

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Article
· Feb 19, 2016 2m read
Simple $system.Event examples

The attached file contains two $system.Event examples that processes work asynchronously using persistent queues:

Events_Simple

This is a very basic example that creates some worker processes and then enqueue messages to them using $system.Event.

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Article
· Nov 17, 2016 11m read
ECP and Process Management API

The technology of load balancing between several servers with relatively low capacity has been a standard feature of Caché for quite a while. It is based on the distributed cache technology called ECP (Enterprise Cache Protocol). ECP provides a host of possibilities for horizontal scaling of an application, and yet keeping the project budget fairly low. Another apparent advantage of ECP network is the possibility to conceal its architecture in the depths of Caché configuration so that applications developed for the traditional (vertical) architecture can be fairly easily migrated to a horizontal ECP environment. The ease of this process is so mesmerizing, that you start wishing it was always this way. For instance, everybody is used to having a possibility to control Caché processes: the $Job system variable and associated classes/functions work magic in skilful hands. Stop, but now processes can end up being on different Caché servers…

This article is about how to gain as much transparency in controlling processes in ECP environment as in traditional (non ECP) one.

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