Article
· May 25, 2023 12m read
AWS Capacity planning review example

I am often asked to review customers' IRIS application performance data to understand if system resources are under or over-provisioned.

This recent example is interesting because it involves an application that has done a "lift and shift" migration of a large IRIS database application to the Cloud. AWS, in this case.

A key takeaway is that once you move to the Cloud, resources can be right-sized over time as needed. You do not have to buy and provision on-premises infrastructure for many years in the future that you expect to grow into.

Continuous monitoring is required. Your application transaction rate will change as your business changes, the application use or the application itself changes. This will change the system resource requirements. Planners should also consider seasonal peaks in activity. Of course, an advantage of the Cloud is resources can be scaled up or down as needed.

For more background information, there are several in-depth posts on AWS and IRIS in the community. A search for "AWS reference" is an excellent place to start. I have also added some helpful links at the end of this post.

AWS services are like Lego blocks, different sizes and shapes can be combined. I have ignored networking, security, and standing up a VPC for this post. I have focused on two of the Lego block components;
- Compute requirements.
- Storage requirements.

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You may have already heard that, starting with IRIS and HealthShare HealthConnect 2023.2 versions, the internal Apache Server will be removed from the default installation, so it will be necessary to have an external application server such as Apache Server or NGINX.


In this article I am going to proceed to install a HealthShare HealthConnect 2023.1 so that it works with a pre-installed Apache Server. For this I will use a virtual machine on which I have installed an Ubuntu 22.04.

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Article
· May 25, 2023 2m read
Reviews on Open Exchange - #28

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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Programming and languages

Being a programmer nowadays is basically the geek version of being a polyglot. Of course, most of us here, in the InterSystems Community, “speak ObjectScript”. Howeever, I believe this wasn’t the first language for many people. For instance, I had never heard about it prior to getting the appropriate training at Innovatium.

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Methods written in ObjectScript can use pass-by-reference arguments to return information to the caller. Python doesn’t support pass-by-reference arguments, so Embedded Python in IRIS doesn’t support them either. That's it, that's the end of the post, hope you liked it. 😉 But wait, what about the Classic Rock & Roll?

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Article
· May 23, 2023 1m read
Production settings

When developing interoperability productions, it might be useful to have settings outside of a Business Host. The primary reason is when you need a setting to affect several different Business Hosts and want to guarantee that the value is the same. While System Default Settings can be used to propagate settings for Business Hosts, they can be changed by overriding the value on a BH level (although the advantage of Business Host settings set via SDS is that they don't need custom code which our current approach requires).
Another reason is when you need to affect non-setting parts of the Business Host configuration (PoolSize, Enabled, etc.)

We will be adding an env setting to a production.

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cover

In this article, I will show you how one can easily create and read Microsoft Word documents using InterSystems IRIS with the leverage power of embedded Python.

Setup

First things first, let’s install the Python module called python-docx. There are a lot of modules to write MS Word files in Python. However, this one is the easiest one to use.

Just execute the following command on the terminal:

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Article
· May 18, 2023 2m read
Code Golf: String Rotations

Let's have a round of Code Golf!

String rotation is when you take a word and move some of its letters to the end of the word, so the first letter becomes the second letter, the second letter becomes the third, and so on. Last letter becomes first. Rotation can happen only in one direction →.
Your task is to write a method that will receive two strings. It then must return an integer value of how many times needed to rotate the strings to be equal.
As usual shortest solution wins.

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Hi Developers!

Often solutions with InterSystems IRIS BI can turn into a quite big solution with dozens of pivots and dashboards.

With every new IRIS BI solution release we can add changes that could influence the behavior of existing pivots or dashboards so they stop working. For example if we change the dimension or measure name, forget deploying some cubes or subject areas, conduct refactoring via mass renaming of cubes and its elements etc some widgets could stop functioning.

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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
· May 11, 2023 1m read
Moving Docker in Windows

During my repeated testing with Docker Desktop, I'm often short on disk space
nd need to clean it over and over as described earlier.
The main reason is the rather uncontrolled growth of ext4.vhdx
that is located on my C: drive by default.
So I decided to move this file to a large external disk.

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These days the vast majority of applications are deployed on public cloud services. There are multiple advantages, including the reduction in human and material resources needed, the ability to grow quickly and cheaply, greater availability, reliability, elastic scalability, and options to improve the protection of digital assets. One of the most favored options is the Google Cloud. It lets us deploy our applications using virtual machines (Compute Engine), Docker containers (Cloud Run), or Kubernetes (Kubernetes Engine). The first one does not use Docker.

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Article
· May 13, 2023 2m read
a virgin Jupyter-Notebook

Following one package from the last contest I met a strange problem.
There was the requirement to install jupyter-notebook
I work on Windows and there was some old Python installed
No big surprise: Installation of jupyter-notebook failed
Therefore, the latest version of Python was installed fast.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can use the system routine ^DBSIZE to estimate the backup file size (see also Note 1).

^DBSIZE estimates the file size of full, cumulative, and differential backups of the databases selected in the database backup list.

The database backup list is created from [System Administration] > [Configuration] > [Database Backup] > [Database Backup List] in the Management Portal.

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Let me introduce my new project, which is irissqlcli, REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) for InterSystems IRIS SQL

  • Syntax Highlighting
  • Suggestions (tables, functions)
  • 20+ output formats
  • stdin support
  • Output to files

Install it with pip

pip install irissqlcli

Or run with docker

docker run -it caretdev/irissqlcli irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM:SYS@host.docker.internal:1972/USER

Connect to IRIS

$ irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM@localhost:1972/USER -W
Password for _SYSTEM:
Server:  InterSystems IRIS Version 2022.3.0.606 xDBC Protocol Version 65
Version: 0.1.0
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> select $ZVERSION
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Expression_1                                                                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IRIS for UNIX (Ubuntu Server LTS for ARM64 Containers) 2022.3 (Build 606U) Mon Jan 30 2023 09:05:12 EST |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set
Time: 0.063s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> help
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Command  | Shortcut          | Description                                                |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| .exit    | \q                | Exit.                                                      |
| .mode    | \T                | Change the table format used to output results.            |
| .once    | \o [-o] filename  | Append next result to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
| .schemas | \ds               | List schemas.                                              |
| .tables  | \dt [schema]      | List tables.                                               |
| \e       | \e                | Edit command with editor (uses $EDITOR).                   |
| help     | \?                | Show this help.                                            |
| nopager  | \n                | Disable pager, print to stdout.                            |
| notee    | notee             | Stop writing results to an output file.                    |
| pager    | \P [command]      | Set PAGER. Print the query results via PAGER.              |
| prompt   | \R                | Change prompt format.                                      |
| quit     | \q                | Quit.                                                      |
| tee      | tee [-o] filename | Append all results to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
Time: 0.012s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER>

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Several steps should be done in order to secure the connection through xDBC clients to an IRIS Server instance using TLS. Most of the information can be obtained from the documentation about TLS on IRIS here, about configuring the security layer for encrypted connections. In the next paragraphs we will cover an step-by-step guide on how to configure and test the connection using SQL Clients apps using ODBC and JDBC.

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In this article, we will establish an encrypted JDBC connection between Tableau Desktop and InterSystems IRIS database using a JDBC driver.
While documentation on configuring TLS with Java clients covers all possible topics on establishing an encrypted JDBC connection, configuring it with Tableau might be a little bit tricky, so I decided to write it down.

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Article
· May 8, 2023 2m read
Reviews on Open Exchange - #27

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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Welcome, dear members of the community!

In this article we are going to demonstrate the great potential that IRIS/HealthConnect makes available to all its users with the use of Embedded Python and we are going to do it by developing a small production that will allow us to recognize and identify the faces present in a JPG file from some images that we will use as a reference.

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Article
· Apr 17, 2017 4m read
Debugging Web

In this article I'll cover testing and debugging Caché web applications (mainly REST) with external tools. Second part covers Caché tools.

You wrote server-side code and want to test it from a client or already have a web application and it doesn't work. Here comes debugging. In this article I'll go from the easiest to use tools (browser) to the most comprehensive (packet analyzer), but first let's talk a little about most common errors and how they can be resolved.

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Article
· Aug 25, 2022 8m read
Transform custom healthcare messages to SDA

EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems are modeled in a proprietary format/structure and are not based on market models such as FHIR or HL7. Some of these systems can interoperate data in a proprietary format for FHIR and other market models, but others can not. InterSystems has two platforms that can interoperate proprietary formats for market ones: InterSystems HealthShare Connect and InterSystems IRIS for Health.

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InterSystems FAQ rubric

In Windows, set the processes with the following image names as monitoring targets.

[irisdb.exe]

contains important system processes.
* Please refer to the attachment for how to check important system processes that should be monitored.

[IRISservice.exe]

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The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as compute resources, storage options, and networking that are delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. New services can be provisioned quickly, without upfront capital expense. This allows enterprises, start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses, and customers in the public sector to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly to changing business requirements.

Updated: 10-Jan, 2023

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Article
· Apr 19, 2023 2m read
Apache Superset now with IRIS

Apache Superset is a modern data exploration and data visualization platform. Superset can replace or augment proprietary business intelligence tools for many teams. Superset integrates well with a variety of data sources.

And now it is possible to use with InterSystems IRIS as well.

An online demo is available and it uses IRIS Cloud SQL as a data source.

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