The most upvoted idea on the InterSystems Ideas Portal—garnering 74 votes—requests a lightweight version of IRIS. While the platform has grown into a powerful data engine, many projects require only its SQL database capabilities. This article demonstrates how to build an unofficial, compact IRIS Community Edition image focused solely on core database functionality, reducing the image size by over 80%.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This project produces an unofficial, experimental image of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

  • Not supported or endorsed by InterSystems.
  • Use at your own risk. The modifications remove core platform features and may break compatibility with tools, APIs, and expected behaviors.
  • No warranties or guarantees apply, including fitness for production use.
  • Intended only for educational and experimental purposes by advanced users.

Why a Lightweight IRIS?

While IRIS today includes rich functionality—interoperability, analytics, machine learning, system management, etc.—many projects only require its core SQL capabilities. The official Community Edition Docker image is approximately:

  • Disk usage: 3.5–3.8 GB
  • Compressed size: ~1.1 GB

IRIS Light reduces that to:

  • Disk usage: ~575–583 MB
  • Compressed size: ~144–148 MB

This makes it suitable for:

  • Microservice or containerized SQL use
  • CI pipelines with faster startup and pull
  • Horizontal scaling where full features are unnecessary

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InterSystems Developer Community is a community of 25,417 amazing developers
We're a place where InterSystems IRIS programmers learn and share, stay up-to-date, grow together and have fun!
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Supply Chain refers to a set of processes and activities performed by the company's business areas and its suppliers and partners (stakeholders), from the acquisition of raw materials, through production, to delivery to the end consumer. It can be better managed using SCM solutions with the orchestration of the InterSystems IRIS:

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Article
· Dec 11 2m read
Reviews on Open Exchange - #60

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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Question
· Dec 10
Cache Studio Debugger

Hi,

I have Cache 2024.1. I attached the process ID from my terminal to the Cache Studio for Debugger. When I click on "Call Stack" tab I only see first 500 shown. Anyone know how to extend so I can see the rest of the information when i click on "Call Stack" tab? Thank you very much.

Second question: Using Cache Studio Debugger, anyone know how to expand the value of this variable when it display F,...

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Updated 12/09/25

Hi Community,

You can unlock the full potential of InterSystems IRIS—and help your team onboard—with the full range of InterSystems learning resources offered online and in person, for every role in your organization. Developers, system administrators, data analysts, and integrators can quickly get up to speed.

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I'm pleased to announce the publication of gj :: dataLoader, a new VS Code extension that simplifies the task of loading data from local CSV files into SQL tables on your InterSystems IRIS servers.

Here's an introductory video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XohVoW5rSy4
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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Hi Community,

With the General Availability of the 2025.3 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform, InterSystems IRIS® for Health™, and HealthShare® Health Connect, we are now collecting your ideas for improvement.

If the new release inspired you or highlighted opportunities to enhance the developer experience, please share your suggestions on the InterSystems Ideas Portal - every idea is reviewed by our product teams and can influence future releases.

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What are best practices for JSON transformation in IRIS interoperability? This is for a non-healthcare use case, so any tools we happen to have around FHIR might not be available. The motivating use case is trimming down a verbose and needlessly complex REST API response to feed to an LLM - trying to reduce token usage and maybe get better results from less noisy data.

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The previous article introduced IrisOASTestGen, a tool designed to generate REST API test code for InterSystems IRIS based on OpenAPI 2.0 specifications. It demonstrated how to scaffold test cases using the default templates bundled with OpenAPI Generator.

This follow-up focuses on the next natural step: customizing the generated test code.
By extending the code generation logic with Mustache templates, it becomes possible to express richer semantics, implement CRUD-aware tests, and create more meaningful test suites.

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Hello!
I have the following XML document obtained through a string:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<MainDocument xmlns="urn:hl7-org:v3">
<realmCode code="IT"/>
<title>kjbkjkjbkjb</title>
<effectiveTime value="20090905150716"/>
[.....other tags.....]
<versionNumber value="1"/>
<component>
<body>mhvjhjkvhj</body>
<component>
<section>content</section>
<ID>5</ID>

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Modern SQL engines are enormously complex pieces of software. Even when they appear stable and mature, subtle bugs can hide in their optimizers, type systems, predicate evaluation, or execution layers. These bugs rarely announce themselves loudly. Instead, they quietly produce incorrect results, behave inconsistently, or fail abruptly under specific combinations of SQL constructs.

This is precisely why tools like SQLancer exist. SQLancer automatically generates SQL queries and uses logical “oracles” to detect when a database behaves incorrectly. It has revealed hundreds of real bugs in widely used systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB.

With this in mind, I attempted to bring SQLancer to InterSystems IRIS, starting with the NOREC oracle — a powerful method for detecting optimizer correctness issues. The journey, however, uncovered not just potential SQL correctness problems, but also a surprising number of driver-level and server-level failures that prevented SQLancer from running at full strength.

This article summarizes why SQLancer is important, how the NOREC oracle works, and what unexpected findings appeared while testing IRIS.

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Let’s spotlight the brilliant authors and contributors of our November Article Bounty! 💙
Thank you to everyone who took part and shared their knowledge with the community.

A special shout-out goes to those who created brand-new articles and contributed their expertise — each received 5,000 points 🎉

@Zion Amsalem -- "Consuming REST-APIs for dummies (beginner-friendly)"
@Robert Cemper -- "Network Debugging for Beginners - 1"
@Iryna Mykhailova -- "Connecting C# to InterSystems IRIS via ODBC"
@Vachan C Rannore -- "My experience with APIs and POS integration."
@Padmaja Konduru -- "Production Terminal Commands"

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One of the newest features of .Net core 10 with C# 14 is the file-based apps. This feature allows you to execute C# code in a simple .cs file without the need to create a solution, a project, or any of the related structure.

For example you can create a script.cs file using the notepad with the content: 

Console.WriteLine(“This is a script in c#.”);

Then in the command line or the terminal you execute the command:

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FastJsonSchema: High-Performance JSON Validation in IRIS

Validating JSON data against JSON Schema is a common requirement for modern applications. FastJsonSchema brings this capability natively to InterSystems IRIS, combining speed, simplicity, and full schema compliance.

Unlike traditional validation approaches, FastJsonSchema generates native ObjectScript code from your JSON Schemas and compiles it directly to iris object code, enabling idiomatic performance without relying on external libraries or runtimes.

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Hello Developers! 👋
I’m excited to introduce IRIS IO Utility, my submission for the InterSystems "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025. This VS Code extension provides you an intuitive and powerful interface for importing and exporting data without leaving your IDE.

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Hey everyone.

As part of an ongoing mission to track down orphaned HL7 Messages in our integration engine, I have been digging into our environment to track down the causes.

Having looked at various posts here (including one of my own) there are a few scenarios that can create orphaned messages resulting in excessive disk space usage. These scenarios are generally:

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Question
· Apr 1, 2017
XML to Json conversion

Hello,

Are there any utilities/api in HealthConnect 2016.2.1 that will allow conversion of XML virtual document to Json format? We were thinking to convert HL7 ADT message to XML via Ensemble DTL and then send it to another BP to convert to Json format for transmission via Web Services. To my understanding there isn't anyway to represent Json as a virtual object so it can be use for direct mapping of HL7 2.x message to Json via Ensemble DTL.

Thanks

Yuriy

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In some cases, it's necessary to manipulate data from one namespace to another. For example, a routine in the "N1" namespace needs data from the "N2" namespace. In legacy systems (using only globals), it's common to make the global universal, but what about persistent classes? Is this type of globalization also possible?

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Hi Developers,

Following the resounding success of last year's new contest, we decided to repeat it. Please welcome

🏆 Bringing Ideas to Reality Contest 🏆

Submit an application that implements an idea from the InterSystems Ideas Portal that has status Community Opportunity or Future Consideration, created before the publication of this announcement, and requires doing the actual programming 😉

Duration: November 17 - December 7, 2025 December 14, 2025 (the submission period extended until December 7)

Prize pool: $12,000

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