Astronomers’ tools

5 years ago, on December 19, 2013, the ESA launched an orbital telescope called Gaia. Learn more about the Gaia mission on the official website of the European Space Agency or in the article by Vitaly Egorov (Billion pixels for a billion stars).

However, few people know what technology the agency chose for storing and processing the data collected by Gaia. Two years before the launch, in 2011, the developers were considering a number of candidates (see “Astrostatistics and Data Mining” by Luis Manuel Sarro, Laurent Eyer, William O’Mullane, Joris De Ridder, pp. 111-112):

• IBM DB2,
• PostgreSQL,
• Apache Hadoop,
• Apache Cassandra and
• InterSystems Caché (to be more precise, the Caché eXTreme Event Persistence technology).

Comparing the technologies side-by-side produced the following results (source):

The first four will probably sound familiar even to schoolchildren. But what is Caché XEP?

NewBie's Corner Session 8 Not

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

Click on the Caché Cube in your system tray and select Terminal to try out these commands.

NOT operator ('), single quote or apostrophe

The "NOT" operator reverses the truth-value and is intended for numeric operands, however it can be used on alphanumeric operands.

This article is intended to describe how the clinFHIR application can be used to help developers both understand FHIR and to develop applications that utilize FHIR artifacts. It’s not intended to be an introduction to FHIR, but rather describe how clinFHIR can help on the learning / development journey.

Here you'll find a simple program that uses Python in an IRIS environment and another simple program that uses ObjectScript in a Python environment. Also, I'd like to share a few of the troubles I went trough while learning to implement this.

Python in IRIS environment

Let's say, for example, you're in an IRIS environment and you want to solve a problem that you find easy, or more efficient with Python.

You can simply change the environment: create your method as any other, and in the end of it's name and specifications, you add [ Language = python ]:

Prometheus is one of the monitoring systems adapted for collecting time series data.

My comments here relate to Atelier 1.0.137 on Windows connecting to Ensemble 2016.2 FT build 627.

I've been looking at what the Atelier Explorer view (hereafter AE), whose root elements are projects, lets us do with the contents of the namespace that the project is connected to:

Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

Spring Boot is the most used Java framework to create REST API and microservices. It can be used to deploy web or executable web or desktop self-contained apps, where the application and another dependencies are packaged toghether. Springboot allows you do to a lot of functions, see:

Note: to learn about SpringBoot see official site - https://spring.io/quickstart

Hi - Recently I have been investigating an annoying situation whilst editing ObjectScript classes or routines in VSCode.

What was happening to me was, as I was typing in lines of code into my class (for example, adding a new Method, or changing the Class signature, or a block of code), this would quickly get syntax checked, re-formatted, and compiled - inevitably, (since I would be mid-way through my typing), this would generate compilation errors.

Introducing Django

Django is a web framework designed to develop servers and APIs, and deal with databases in a fast, scalable, and secure way. To assure that, Django provides tools not only to create the skeleton of the code but also to update it without worries. It allows developers to see changes almost live, correct mistakes with the debug tool, and treat security with ease.

To understand how Django works, let’s take a look at the image:

Windows 7 and some other Microsoft Operating Systems can shutdown too fast for large applications, such as a Cache instance with a large amount of data and changes, to close gracefully.

In addition to its general security, Caché offers SQL security with a granularity of a single row. This is called row-level security. With row-level security, each row holds a list of authorized viewers, which can be either users or roles. By default access is determined at object modification Some time ago I became interested in determining row-level security at runtime. Here's how to implement it.

In this article I'd like to discuss asynchronous REST and approaches to implementing it.

Why do we need asynchronous REST? Simply put - answering the request takes too much time. While most requests usually can be satisfied immediately, some can't. The reasons are varied:

• You need to perform time-consuming calculations
• Performing action actually takes time (for example container creation)
• etc.

The solution to these problems is asynchronous REST. Asynchronous REST works by separating request and real response. Here's an example, let's consider the following simple async REST broker:

The Lo-Code Challenge

Imagine the scene. You are working happily at Widgets Direct, the internet's premier retailer of Widgets and Widget Accessories. Your boss has some devastating news, some customers might not be fully happy with their widgets, and we need a helpdesk application to track these complaints. To makes things interesting, he wants this with a very small code footprint and challenges you to deliver an application in less than 150 lines of code using InterSystems IRIS. Is this even possible?