In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Jul 4, 2020 4m read
Editor Archaeology

During the development of the Terminal Multi-Line Command Editor I discovered in my IRIS installation
a piece of software that I just can classify as a historic artifact. And it is still fully operational !!!

As it dates back to times before InterSystems was founded in 1978 you may understand my surprise.
I personally stepped into that environment in 1978 and used it then for daily work.

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Robert Cemper · Jun 25, 2020 12m read
Backport %JSON.* to Caché

Attention:

This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

Full backport from IRIS for Windows (x86-64) 2020.1 (Build 215U) Mon Mar 30 2020 20:14:33 EDT

IRIS brought us an excellent %JSON.Package
It is an essential component of the Project Manager (ZPM)
This backport makes it available also in Caché and builds a base to eventually backport also ZPM.

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Article
Timothy Leavitt · Jul 8, 2020 7m read
Tips for debugging with %Status

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

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While the integrity of Caché and InterSystems IRIS databases is completely protected from the consequences of system failure, physical storage devices do fail in ways that corrupt the data they store.  For that reason, many sites choose to run regular database integrity checks, particularly in coordination with backups to validate that a given backup could be relied upon in a disaster.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Jul 21, 2020 2m read
Un-Typical persistence 
This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3 and IRIS 2020.2 
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

During my search for a snapshot of a persistent object,
I met a feature that I would like tho share as it could be useful in some special situations.
My trigger was to have a before- and an after-image during unit testing.

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This is a coding example working on IRIS 2020.2 
It will not be kept in synch with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

My demo video is now also available to watch the demo in operation.
https://youtu.be/dSV-0RJ5Olg

 

Hi folks,
It's time now for a Micro Service Demo with a total fresh IRIS Image and an image that you both PULL with
docker  and run with only 4 lines of docker commands. 
June 1st, 2020 - rcc

There is now a compact All-in-1 version available that combines all parts in a single container image.
For details see: IRIS-NativeAPI-Nodejs-compact
May 24, 2020 - rcc

I have added a simplified installation using Docker, see context
May 25, 2020 - rcc

There are enhanced scripts suitable & tested for Linux & Windows available here
https://github.com/rcemper/WSockClientMicroSV/blob/master/READMEwindows.MD
May 26, 2020 - rcc

This demo is a redesign of the WebSocket Client based on Node.js existing already for Caché. The major changes:

  • use of the new IRIS Native API for Node.js  especially Working with Global Arrays
  • change from a directly triggered client to a server design
  • put the result into a separate docker image as an example for a MicroService / MicroServer
  • add a simple interface in IRIS to control the MicroService execution.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Jul 27, 2020 3m read
ZPMshow - a helper for tired fingers 
This is a coding example working on IRIS 2020.2 
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

A helper to List, Install, Uninstall ZPM packages

The offer of ZPM is growing daily and the short names and
acronyms of the offer are sometimes hard to understand and
also hard to type with my lazy fingers.

Video

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Article
Robert Cemper · Nov 21, 2020 3m read
ObjectScript over ODBC 
This is a coding example working on IRIS 2020.1 and on Caché 2018.1.3 
It will not be kept in sync with new versions      
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !
Every now and then you may encounter a situation where for various reasons
ODBC is the only option to access a remote system. Which is sufficient as long as you need to examine or change tables.
But you can't directly execute some commands or change some Global.
 
Special thanks @Anna Golitsyna for inspiring me to publish this.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Jul 20, 2020 2m read
SPOOL as SQL Table

 

This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3 and IRIS 2020.2 
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

Background

Device #2 named SPOOL dates back to the predecessors of Caché and IRIS
It was the first "%Stream" like option to buffer output before printing.
It is also the first and still today the most simple way of output redirection.

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As we all well know, InterSystems IRIS has an extensive range of tools for improving the scalability of application systems. In particular, much has been done to facilitate the parallel processing of data, including the use of parallelism in SQL query processing and the most attention-grabbing feature of IRIS: sharding. However, many mature developments that started back in Caché and have been carried over into IRIS actively use the multi-model features of this DBMS, which are understood as allowing the coexistence of different data models within a single database. For example, the HIS qMS database contains both semantic relational (electronic medical records) as well as traditional relational (interaction with PACS) and hierarchical data models (laboratory data and integration with other systems). Most of the listed models are implemented using SP.ARM's qWORD tool (a mini-DBMS that is based on direct access to globals). Therefore, unfortunately, it is not possible to use the new capabilities of parallel query processing for scaling, since these queries do not use IRIS SQL access.

Meanwhile, as the size of the database grows, most of the problems inherent to large relational databases become right for non-relational ones. So, this is a major reason why we are interested in parallel data processing as one of the tools that can be used for scaling.

In this article, I would like to discuss those aspects of parallel data processing that I have been dealing with over the years when solving tasks that are rarely mentioned in discussions of Big Data. I am going to be focusing on the technological transformation of databases, or, rather, technologies for transforming databases.

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Over the past year or so, my team (Application Services at InterSystems - tasked with building and maintaining many of our internal applications, and providing tools and best practices for other departmental applications) has embarked on a journey toward building Angular/REST-based user interfaces to existing applications originally built using CSP and/or Zen. This has presented an interesting challenge that may be familiar to many of you - building out new REST APIs to existing data models and business logic.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Jul 29, 2020 5m read
SQL for ^ERROR Global 
This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3 and IRIS 2020.2 
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

Standard error logs in IRIS / Caché / Ensemble are written global ^ERRORS.
As this piece dates back some decades back to previous millennium its structure
is far from the typical SQL storage structures.

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Article
Robert Cemper · May 14, 2020 2m read
IRIS-Docker-micro-Durability

During the development of a container-based demo I found the need to access a fresh docker
instance of IRIS image (e.g intersystems/iris-community:2020.2.0.199.0) over and over.
To bypass setting passwords and loading my code repeatedly I developed this workaround.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Sep 14, 2020 3m read
IRIS Native API for ObjectScript

It seems to me that for some reason this didn't make its way to the official documentation
and seems to be rather unknown though implemented already in IRIS 2020.1

Thanks to @Dan Pasco I got a hint on the classes involved.
I used the recommended sequence of how to use it. 
it is all directly taken from Class Reference and I just collected it to create a first overview.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Mar 5, 2021 3m read
Using ECP across IRIS and Caché

Migration from Caché to IRIS can be quite a challenge if your code is grown over many years
and probably not so clean structured as you may like it. So you face the need to check your
migrated code against some reference data. A few samples might not be a problem,
but some hundred GB of data for testing might be.  

A possible step could be to have your fresh code in IRIS but leave your huge datastore on Caché and connect both environments over ECP.  I have created a demo project that gives you the opportunity to try this based on 2 Docker images with IRIS and with Caché connected over ECP.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Feb 8, 2021 3m read
WebSocket Client with embedded Python

This is a demo to make use of a simple WebSocket Client with Embedded Python in IRIS.

To continue my series of WebSocket Client I have added an example written in Python.
The most impressive experience was how easy the writing and testing of the client was
which happened total offline from IRIS.
Embedding, running and feeding the client with data from IRIS was also incredibly simple.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Feb 10, 2021 3m read
Using ZPM for Node.js

Inspired by  @Evgeny Shvarov  and his recent article 
Deploying InterSystems IRIS Embedded Python Solutions with ZPM Package Manager
I propagated the idea forward to do the same also for modules in Node.js.
The case is based on my example of IRIS Native API for Node.js.

To anticipate the obvious reply that InterSystems IRIS supports WebSockets natively as a client:
This is correct and here is my aged related article with the link to the example in OEX

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