Hello!

In my last article, I went through a walkthrough on how you can try deploying InterSystems IRIS Community Edition, or IRIS for Health Community Edition for free on AWS. In this follow up, I will show the same for the next biggest cloud provider, Microsoft Azure.

Like with AWS, Azure also provides a free offering on sign up, although its a bit less generous - you get $200 free credit to spend in the first month. This does mean you can once again try deploying IRIS Community edition for free on Azure, although I do recommend caution to avoid costly bills.

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In Part 1, we laid the technical foundation of MAIS (Multi-Agent Interoperability Systems). We have successfully wired up the 'Brain', built a robust Adapter using LiteLLM, locked down our API keys with IRIS Credentials, and finally cracked the trick code on the Python interoperability puzzle.

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France & Benelux READY 2026 has just come to an end, and once again, these two days demonstrated how dynamic, curious, and engaged the Developer Community truly is. Here is a look back in words and images at this great edition.

The event kicked off with welcome remarks from @Adeline Icard and @Geoffroy Vitoux, setting the tone for the days ahead: innovation, sharing, and collaboration.

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Article
· Feb 4 11m read
IKO Plus: HSSYS Mirroring with IKO

Enabling HSSYS Mirroring Out of the Gate with IKO

For those of us building InterSystems workloads on Kubernetes, we are definitely spoiled with the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) doing the heavy lifting and mirroring on day one. Where us spoiled brats jump up and down is when we try to add additional databases/namespaces when we provision from HealthConnect containers on day two, while others get to utilize HealthShare Mirroring for this task, the prerequisite of mirroring HSSYS out of the gate has been somewhat elusive. Here is example on how you can this powerful feature up and running with the employment of IKO and IrisClusters.

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TL;DR This article explains how to deploy InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on AWS using the AWS Marketplace and EC2. It covers prerequisites, instance selection, security settings, SSH access, and first verification steps. The deployment can be completed using the AWS Free Tier and is suitable for developers who want to quickly start working with IRIS in the cloud.

Who this guide is for.

This guide is intended for developers, solution architects, and DevOps engineers who want to deploy InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on Amazon Web Services (AWS). No prior AWS automation experience is required, but basic familiarity with EC2 and SSH is helpful.

What you will achieve.

After completing this guide, you will be able to:

  1. Launch InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on AWS
  2. Configure a secure EC2 instance
  3. Connect to IRIS using SSH and the Management Portal
  4. Verify that IRIS is running correctly

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

  1. An active AWS account
  2. Permissions to create EC2 instances and security groups
  3. An SSH key pair configured in AWS
  4. Basic knowledge of Linux command line

Deployment overview

The deployment process consists of the following steps:

  1. Launch IRIS Community Edition from AWS Marketplace
  2. Select an EC2 instance type
  3. Configure networking and security
  4. Connect to the instance via SSH
  5. Verify IRIS installation

Hi Gang!

Did you know you can deploy InterSystems IRIS Community Edition on the cloud without paying for a license? You can try for free, and it could even come in handy if you want to show off that shiny new app you've created (maybe for the full stack competition..?)

In this article I will provide a complete walkthrough on how to deploy IRIS on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and will also add a follow up for deploying on Azure.

Now before I begin the walkthrough, I want to admit that I was terrified of using AWS the first time because I'd seen memes about how easy it is to rack up costs on AWS. So if you're thinking the same, I suggest you start by signing up to a Free Tier Account, which gives you $100 free credit to evaluate, and automatically shuts off to prevent charges. InterSystems IRIS Community Edition has a free license so if you pair the two, you can deploy without risk and completely for free. (Disclaimer: although I'm sure this is true, please do read the free account terms and make your own decisions 😅 )

Note, this article walks through deploying IRIS Community on AWS, however the same guide can be followed to deploy IRIS for Health Community Edition, or with Bring-your-own-licence editions of IRIS and IRIS for Health, to deploy a fully licensed, production version of IRIS on AWS.

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How many times have you had to receive or generate a JSON and wished you could work on it using DTLs without having to deal with DynamicObjects trying to remember the name of each field? Do you want to break down and make your giant JSON file more digestible?

In my case, never, but I thought that someone might find it useful to have a feature that captures your JSON and breaks it down into a series of ObjectScript classes that you can work with more easily and conveniently.

Well then...behold JSON2Class in all its glory!

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Article
· Jan 25 2m read
Reviews on Open Exchange - #63

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review, you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

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Article
· Jan 21 2m read
Archiving my OEX packages

Over the last 9 years, I published more than 90 packages in OEX.
And over this time, conditions and environments changed.
In the beginning, there was

  • no Docker
  • no IPM/ZPM
  • no embedded Python, no AI
  • Caché, Ensemble, CSP, ZEN, .... were dominating

As time changed, also product versions and external languages changed.
Adjustment of a few packages was no issue in the beginning,
and was a matter of support quality to my "consumers".

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As applications grow, every database eventually hits scaling limits. Whether it's storage capacity, concurrent users, query throughput, or I/O bandwidth, single-server architectures have inherent constraints. This guide explains fundamental approaches to database scalability and shows how InterSystems IRIS implements these patterns to support enterprise-scale workloads.

We'll explore two complementary scaling strategies: horizontal scaling for user volume (distributing computational load) and sharding for data volume (partitioning datasets). Understanding the general principles behind these approaches will help you make informed decisions about when and how to scale your IRIS applications.

The examples in this guide use InterSystems IRIS in Docker containers.

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If one of your packages on OEX receives a review, you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

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Over the last year, the CCR development team has prioritized changes to the CCR application to better expose and encourage best practices for using CCR. This article will highlight some of the areas that we've focused on:

  • Organization Dashboard
  • System Alerts
  • Branch Hygiene

In each of these areas, we have increased the visibility of potential CCR usage issues and given users tools to proactively address them.

Organization Dashboard

We have continued to build out the available information on the Organization details page

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What is a FHIR Profile?

A FHIR profile is a collection of rules and constraints used to customize and refine a base Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) resource. Profiling is a vital process that adapts the base FHIR resource standard to satisfy the unique requirements of a specific use case, geographic region, medical institution, or clinical workflow.

While the base FHIR specification provides generic, flexible definitions for resources (such as Patient, Observation, or Medication), profiles transform these generic resources into more precise ones. This ensures consistent and interoperable data exchange tailored for a particular community or implementation.

FHIR is designed to cover various healthcare scenarios globally. Profiles allow implementers to adapt this general platform without losing the benefits of standardization.

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InterSystems IRIS is built on an architecture that separates the logical organization of data (namespaces) from its physical storage location (databases). Understanding this separation and the distinction between Namespaces and Databases is crucial for effective data management, security, and especially, high-performance data sharing.

In this article, I will discuss these foundational components and provide a practical guide on leveraging global mappings to share native data structures (globals) across different logical environments.

Databases: Physical Reality

A database represents the physical reality of where the data is stored on the disk. First and foremost, it’s a file in a file system called IRIS.dat (e.g., <Install folder>\mgr\user\IRIS.DAT). The maximum size of this file is 32TB. It is the container for all the actual data and the code. Databases are managed by the IRIS kernel, which handles caching, journaling, and transaction logging at the physical file level.

When you install InterSystems IRIS DBMS, the following databases are installed automatically:

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There are numerous excellent tools available for testing your REST APIs, especially when they are live. Postman, various web browser extensions, and even custom ObjectScript written with %Net.HttpRequest objects can get the job done. However, it is often difficult to test just the REST API without inadvertently involving the authentication scheme, the web application configuration, or even network connectivity. Those are a lot of hoops to jump through just to test the code within your dispatch class. The good news is that if we take our time to understand the inner workings of the %CSP.REST class, we will find an alternative option suited for testing only the contents of the dispatch class. We can set up the request and response objects to invoke the methods directly.

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If one of your packages on OEX receives a review, you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

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You probably know this situation:
Some time ago, you found a very special $ZU function for a very specific type of problem. Some kind of mystical formula. It became popular and was used by many developers throughout your code and across all your installations.

Several versions and updates later, you are informed by ISC that your mystical $ZU is deprecated and no longer supported. You are advised to replace it with a new $something().

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When working with InterSystems Interoperability (Iris / Health Connect / Ensemble), configuration data is often spread across many production items: services, processes, operations, adapters, and their settings.

A common operational or security need is to answer questions like:

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Embeddedpy-bridge: A Toolkit for Embedded Python

Overview

Embedded Python is a game-changer for InterSystems IRIS, offering access to the vast Python ecosystem directly within the database. However, bridging the gap between ObjectScript and Python can sometimes feel like translating between two different worlds.

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Sometimes it is more convenient, more efficient, and more secure, to limit FHIR Searches per pre-defined "Lists" of Resources.

Since v2025.1 we support several List-related features in our FHIR Server.

I will highlight these here, and provide some samples.

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Article
· Dec 24, 2025 1m read
Using IRIS as a vector database

InterSystems IRIS embedded vector search capabilities lets us search unstructured and semi-structured data. Data is converted to vectors (also called ‘embeddings’) and then stored and indexed in InterSystems IRIS for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), text analysis, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

This is a simple demo of IRIS being used as a vector database and similarity search on IRIS.

Prerequisites:

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InterSystems API Manager (IAM) is a core component of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, offering centralized API management with a strong emphasis on security. IAM simplifies the entire API lifecycle, from creation to retirement, and provides a developer portal for easy API discovery and integration. Access control features allow administrators to define precise permissions, and IAM seamlessly integrates with the IRIS Data Platform, enhancing data management and integration capabilities.

Features of IAM include:

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