Hi Community!

We know that every developer has small side projects — apps where you experiment with new technologies, test ideas before implementing them in bigger solutions, or just build something fun for the sake of curiosity. But what if one of those projects could take you all the way to the InterSystems READY 2025?

We’re launching a unique opportunity: show us your passion, creativity, and love for IRIS, and win a free pass to the InterSystems READY + hotel accommodation!

The rules are simple: upload your fun IRIS-based side project to Open Exchange, and record a short inspirational video about why you should be the one to get the pass to THE event of the year and win!

Duration: April 21 - May 04, 2025

Prizes: hotel accommodation and free passes to the InterSystems READY 2025!

We have a big update this quarter.

• RHEL 10 was released yesterday, read on for what that means for you
• 2025.3 will use OpenSSL 3 across all operating systems  SUSE 15 sp6 will be the minimum OS for orgs using SUSE
• The minimum CPU standards are going up in 2025.3
• Older Windows Server operating systems will no longer be supported in 2025.3

InterSystems IRIS 2025.2 introduces the IRISSECURITY database, the new home for security data. Unlike IRISSYS, the previous home for security data, IRISSECURITY can be encrypted, which secures your sensitive data at rest. In a future version, IRISSECURITY will be mirrorable.

This version also introduces the %SecurityAdministrator role for general security administration tasks.

This article describes a significant enhancement of how InterSystems IRIS deals with table statistics, a crucial element for IRIS SQL processing, in the 2025.2 release. We'll start with a brief refresher on what table statistics are, how they are used, and why we needed this enhancement. Then, we'll dive into the details of the new infrastructure for collecting and saving table statistics, after which we'll zoom in onto what the change means in practice for your applications. We'll end with a few additional notes on patterns enabled by the new model, and look forward to the follow-on phases of this initial delivery.

Hello!!!

Data migration often sounds like a simple "move data from A to B task" until you actually do it. In reality, it is a complex process that blends planning, validation, testing, and technical precision.

Over several projects where I handled data migration into a HIS which runs on IRIS (TrakCare), I realized that success comes from a mix of discipline and automation.

Here are a few points which I want to highlight.

1. Start with a Defined Data Format.

Before you even open your first file, make sure everyone, especially data providers, clearly understands the exact data format you expect. Defining templates early avoids unnecessary bank-and-forth and rework later.

While Excel or CSV formats are common, I personally feel using a tab-delimited text file (.txt) for data upload is best. It's lightweight, consistent, and avoids issues with commas inside text fields.

PatID   DOB Gender  AdmDate
10001   2000-01-02  M   2025-10-01
10002   1998-01-05  F   2025-10-05
10005   1980-08-23  M   2025-10-15

Make sure that the date formats given in the file is correct and constant throughout the file because all these files are usually converted from an Excel file and an Basic excel user might make mistakes while giving you the date formats wrong. Wrong date formats can irritate you while converting into horolog.

I know that people who are completely new to VS Code, Git, Docker, FHIR, and other tools can sometimes struggle with setting up the environment. So I decided to write an article that walks through the entire setup process step by step to make it easier to get started.

I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment at the end - let me know if the instructions were clear, if anything was missing, or if there’s anything else you'd find helpful.

The setup includes:

✅ VS Code – Code editor
✅ Git – Version control system
✅ Docker – Runs an instance of IRIS for Health Community
✅ VS Code REST Client Extension – For running FHIR API queries
✅ Python – For writing FHIR-based scripts
✅ Jupyter Notebooks – For AI and FHIR assignments

Before you begin: Ensure you have administrator privileges on your system.

In addition to reading the guide, you can also follow the steps in the videos:

For Windows

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IyvuHbxCwCY
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Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations deploying mission-critical applications must implement robust security architectures that protect sensitive data while maintaining high availability and performance. This is especially crucial for enterprises utilizing advanced database management systems like InterSystems IRIS, which often powers applications handling highly sensitive healthcare, financial, or personal data.

Summer is coming to an end, and we’re sure you had plenty of highlights! ✨

Maybe you learned something valuable, got yourself a reward on Global Masters, or even joined READY 2025 🎉

Here’s a quick checklist — but you can, of course, share anything else about your summer in the comments. Photos are more than welcome 📸

Sometimes customers need a small IRIS instance to do something in the cloud and shut it down, or they need hundreds of containers (i.e. one per end user or one per interface) with small workloads. This exercise came about to see how small an IRIS instance could be. For this exercise we focused on what is the smallest amount of memory we can configure for an IRIS instance. Do you know all the parameters that affect the memory allocated by IRIS ?

It helps to remove special characters, such as non-utf-8 characters either control characters or unicode characters from text that is not printable or can't be parsed by downstream systems.

There is also $C(32) in this condition; sometimes NBSP appears in the text and it will not be recognized by TIE, but downstream it displays as "?".

Here at InterSystems, we often deal with massive datasets of structured data. It’s not uncommon to see customers with tables spanning >100 fields and >1 billion rows, each table totaling hundred of GB of data. Now imagine joining two or three of these tables together, with a schema that wasn’t optimized for this specific use case. Just for fun, let’s say you have 10 years worth of EMR data from 20 different hospitals across your state, and you’ve been tasked with finding….

Hi devs!

Suppose I have an instance of a persistent class:

Set person = ##class(dc.Sample.Person).%OpenId(1)

Class is an ancestor of %JSON.Adapter.

How can I convert it to dynamic object with the properties that person.%JSONExport() provides?

BroadSea - Core OHDSI Walkthrough with InterSystems OMOP

Hello IRIS community,

InterSystems Certification is currently developing a certification exam for InterSystems IRIS SQL professionals, and if you match the exam candidate description given below, we would like you to beta test the exam! The exam will be available for beta testing starting May 19, 2025.