Overview
This article explains how InterSystems IRIS Data Platform handles both transactional and analytic workloads without sacrificing performance. It also covers how the platform manages memory and scales under peak load, what its security model looks like, and how global banks and brokerages are using it in production today.
InterSystems IRIS Data Platform for Financial Services
InterSystems IRIS data platform is a technology for mission-critical financial services applications.
I would like to create a generic error handler defined somewhere in a class (or if not possible a routine that calls a class).
This should not be page specific but for the whole app (as I have lots of CSP pages inside a legacy app). Obvisouly this will not be a single try catch block but rather something setup at system level (or web application level if not possible). The same way it's possible to handle sessions in a global way (by having aclass that inherit from %CSP.SessionEvents).
Hi everyone,
I created a short demo and reference repository showing how to configure Auth0 as an OAuth provider for an InterSystems IRIS FHIR server, and how to call protected FHIR resources from a Python Flask application.
The links below include a video walkthrough and a github repo with the sample application used in the video
Links
Video walkthrough:
GitHub repository: https://github.com/MarshyKid/iris-fhir-oauth-demo
to dismount/mount a database, use Dismount() and Mount() methods in SYS.Database class available in %SYS namespace.
NB: the database ID is its Directory
You'll find some examples of how to dismount/mount and check if a database is mounted (Mounted=1) or not (Mounted=0), and quickly see all the attributes of a database (via zwrite)
%SYS>set db="/opt/irisapp/data"
%SYS>w ##class(SYS.Database).%OpenId(db).Mounted
1
%SYS>w ##class(SYS.Database).%OpenId(db).Dismount()
1
%SYS>w ##class(SYS.Database).%OpenId(db).Mounted
0
%SYS>w ##class(SYS.Database).%OpenId(db).Mount()
1
%SYS>w ##class(SYS.Database).%OpenId(db).Mounted
1
%SYS>zw ##class(SYS.Database).%OpenId(db)
+----------------- general information ---------------
| oref value: 3
| class name: SYS.Database
| %%OID: $lb("/opt/irisapp/data","SYS.Database")
| reference count: 2
+----------------- attribute values ------------------
| %Concurrency = 0 <Set>
| BlockFormat = 2
| BlockSize = 8192 <Set>
| Blocks = 780288
| BlocksPerMap = 62464
| ClusterMountMode = 0 <Set>
| ClusterMounted = 0 <Set>
| CurrentMaps = 13
| Directory = "/opt/irisapp/data/" <Set>
| DirectoryBlock = 3
| EncryptedDB = 0 <Set>
| EncryptionKeyID = ""
| Expanding = 0
| ExpansionSize = 0 <Set>
| Full = 0
| GlobalJournalState = 3 <Get,Set>
| InActiveMirror = 0
| LastExpansionTime = "09/06/2023 20:00:01"
| MaxSize = 0 <Set>
|MirrorActivationRequired = 0
| MirrorDBCatchup = 0
| MirrorDBCreatedNew = 0
| MirrorDBName = ""
| MirrorDBPaused = 0
| MirrorFailoverDB = 0
| MirrorNoWrite = 0
| MirrorObsolete = 0
| MirrorSetName = ""
| Mirrored = 0
| Mounted = 1
| NewGlobalCollation = 5 <Set>
|NewGlobalGrowthBlock = 50 <Set>
| NewGlobalIsKeep = 0 <Set>
|NewGlobalPointerBlock = 16 <Set>
| NumberOfConfigDB = 0
| ROReasonCode = 0
| ROReasonText = ""
| ReCreate = 0
| ReadOnly = 0 <Set>
| ReadOnlyMounted = 0
| Reinitialize = 0
| RequestSize = 0
| ResourceName = "%DB_IRISAPP-DATA"
|RunCatchupDBOnCreate = 1
| SFN = 6
| Size = 6096 <Set>
| Skeleton = 0
| SparseDB = 0
+-----------------------------------------------------
%SYS>
We released the x64_64 Ubuntu 26.04 build back on May 21st. At the time we said that we were holding off on releasing ARM support due to come occasional network problems we found in testing. We've worked with Ubuntu to resolve those issues - a bug in a vendor's network driver - and are pleased to say...
InterSystems announces the general availability of:
This release adds support for the Ubuntu 26.04 operating system for both ARM and x86_64 processors
We have a task that runs objectscript code to load data into a linked external table. After upgrading from 2024.1 to 2025.1, the load is throwing an error, with error code -400, and no error message. The data DOES get loaded into the external table in its entirety, so with no meaningful error message, its hard to determine what the issue is. The result is the same with and without the USING clause, so don't let that confuse you.
To better understand Streams in IRIS I'll start with a short
In the beginning (before IRIS), there was just basic access to external devices.
The 4 commands OPEN, CLOSE, READ, WRITE still work and are documented
by Introduction to I/O in detail.
Especially for files, this is a direct access to your actual file system.
You have to take care of any status or other signal in your code.
Also, any code conversion or similar is up to you.
Class %Library.File aka %File offers a large collection of methods and queries
for standard operations on directories and files.
Hi,
I'm doing a query in SQL and I need to sort my data by some non-repeated field.
Unfortunately, my data is grouped in a way that I cannot guarantee that any column will not have repeated data, so one solution would be to take the row number.
Also, the Cache is not accepting Row_Number () in my querry and I would like to know if there is another solution to return line numbers or some way to add this function to the Cache.
Best regards.
Is it possible to authenticate an xDBC (ODBC/JDBC) connection to InterSystems IRIS via (a 3rd party) OAuth server?
For REST APIs this is possible, but could this be achieved with OAuth?
Out-of-the-box the ODBC/JDBC Drivers don't seem to have this option, but maybe some custom code could enable this? perhaps via Delegated Authentication and some OAuth classes customization, or some other way?
Has anyone done this already and can share how it was implemented, or someone with some guideline suggestions?
Epidemiological surveillance is one of the foundational pillars of public health. Régis Júnior et al. (2026) define it as a continuous system of data collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of health events — a function whose effectiveness depends critically on the quality of information systems, data analysis capacity, and coordination between different levels of care.
I know IRIS has a built-in testing framework, but I'm not sure how to write tests that validate the full message flow through a Production without depending on external systems. Do you mock Business Operations? Is there a pattern you use to test integration scenarios in an isolated and repeatable way?
I'm trying to lock down access in our IRIS system.
I notice there is no current %DB_X resource (which I want to add to add a read-only role for it).
If I add resource %DB_X will there be an immediate effect or will it only be applicable to roles (and users linked to that role)?
I understand that Business Rules can be used to route or transform messages without touching code. But I'm not clear on when it's better to use a Business Rule versus handling the logic directly inside a BPL or a custom BP class. What criteria do you use to decide between them?
If I need to add or change properties in a message class that is already being used by a running Production, what is the safest way to do this? Are there risks with existing messages in the queue or in the message store? Is there a migration strategy the community recommends?
FHIR REST APIs are powerful and standardized, but they are not a general-purpose query engine.
They are great for operations such as reading resources, searching by supported parameters, following links, and working with Bundles. But many real-world questions require orchestration across multiple resources.
For example:
Hi folks,
One of the things I've been thinking about recently: how strong AI is changing my work as an ObjectScript developer right now! Yeah, yeah, I know I'm not a very fast, it should have happened 2-3 years ago... But it's only now that I've realized that I am not writing the code all my workday like before.
Hospital readmissions cost the US healthcare system $17 billion annually. A significant portion of those readmissions are preventable — but only if the right information reaches the right clinician at the right moment: at discharge.
That's the problem I set out to solve with Smart Discharge Navigator, my entry for the InterSystems Programming Contest: AI Agents for FHIR 2026.
I want to thanks the InterSystems Global Masters Rewards.
I think better than reward, is the opportunity ti share knowledge, experience and help the community to increase.
Now I'll develop with more focus... ;)
Let's go share wit all.
There seems to be a generous use of ClassMethods in ObjectScript code generally. I hope my own experiences aren't representative, but I bet they are. Forgive me for giving away the ending of this article, but in short: don't use them. Unless you can make a pretty convincing case that you have to, just never use them.1
What is a ClassMethod? In an ObjectScript class, you can define methods in two different ways: in a Method, you must instantiate an instance of the class to call the method, and in a ClassMethod, you can call the method without instantiating the class. Of course, in a ClassMethod, you don't have access to any properties of the object (because there's no object), but you can access globals (they are global, after all) and Parameters (which are class constants).
Common Table Expressions (CTEs) provide a structured framework for defining reusable intermediate result sets within SQL statements. InterSystems IRIS implements CTEs via the WITH clause, enabling clearer query composition and modular analytical processing while remaining fully integrated with the IRIS cost-based optimizer.
This article explores the semantics of CTEs in InterSystems IRIS, explains their interaction with query optimization, discusses appropriate deployment scenarios, and presents executable examples illustrating practical patterns for production environments.
An engineering walkthrough of the IRIS-CardioFlow project architecture with real code for its AI, FHIR, and connectivity layers and the role of iris-agentic-dev in a modern ObjectScript workflow.
Monitoring cardiovascular surgical flow in real time is a classic healthcare integration problem: data arrives from heterogeneous sources, must be persisted with clinical semantics, exposed through an API, and presented in a way the care team can act on. The CardioIris repository (internally named IRIS-CardioFlow) is a lean demonstration of that scenario, built on InterSystems IRIS 2026.
Hi Community,
Have you ever wished your EHR could think? Not just display data. Not just fire alerts. But actually read a patient record, reason over clinical guidelines, and write a structured referral order back to the system — in response to a single message from a clinician
In this article, I am going to show you how to create your own custom clinical AI agent.
iris-fhir-agents is a multi-agent clinical AI platform built entirely on InterSystems IRIS for Health.
When I started building Smart Discharge Navigator, I faced a common challenge: FHIR data is stored as JSON bundles, but the analysis I needed required joining multiple resources together, the kind of thing SQL was built for.
InterSystems FHIR SQL Builder solved this completely. Instead of parsing JSON bundles in application code, I was able to write plain SQL directly against FHIR resource projections inside IRIS for Health. This article shows exactly how I used it to build the population-level readmission risk scoring engine at the heart of the application.
Back when I was a Developer Support Engineer in the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC), I would occasionally receive cases involving large message backlogs in a production. The customer would discover that a subset of queued messages were no longer useful and would ask a question similar to the following:
Is there an established best practice for mass-aborting messages in a specific component's queue that match a particular set of criteria?
This article introduces SHAP explainability methods as an approach to understand the reasons behind predictions in machine learning black-box models. It also includes a simple Jupyter notebook that you can use and modify to gain hands-on experience with these concepts:
https://www.kaggle.com/code/jorgeivnjh/explainability-in-ml-models
https://github.com/JorgeIvanJH/Explainability-in-ML-models
We will leverage these concepts for a future implementation in our Continuous Training Pipeline: https://community.intersystems.com/post/complementing-iris-mlflow-continuous-training-ct-pipeline
I’m pleased to share a demo of FHIR Agent Studio, now available on YouTube.
FHIR Agent Studio Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vktfq_kvNnk
FHIR Agent Studio brings AI agents together with FHIR, InterSystems IRIS, Vector Search, and large language models to demonstrate how developers can explore, build, and test agent-driven healthcare workflows.
You can also find more information here:
Introduction article: https://community.intersystems.com/post/introducing-fhir-agent-studio-ai-agents-fhir-intersystems-iris
GitHub repository: https://github.com/SeanConnelly/ai-studio-for-fhir
Hey! June Article Bounty is live on Global Masters! ☀️🚀
Submit a brand-new article on one of the announced topics and earn a bounty of 🏆 5,000 Global Masters points once it’s approved! 🎉
Here’s the list of June topics:
An AI agent reads the FHIR patient record before the consultation, asks the right questions based on what it already knows, detects critical red flags, and writes its findings back — so the physician arrives prepared.
This project was inspired in the suggested task #10 (Conversational FHIR Triage Assistant) for the InterSystems Programming Contest: AI Agents for FHIR
Before a patient walks into a consultation room, a critical failure has already occurred: nobody read their medical history. The physician has 15 minutes.
I've seen that %JSON.Adaptor makes it easy to serialize and deserialize objects to JSON, but I've also seen people building custom serialization logic. Are there scenarios where %JSON.Adaptor falls short, such as handling nested objects, null values or custom field naming conventions? What has been your experience?
Sara is my entry for the InterSystems AI Agents for FHIR contest. Feel free to try out Sara and vote for Sara on the contest page.
https://youtu.be/UAjI9O848wU?si=BWTVk9gsV4xTOlUj
Physicians spend only 47% of their work time on direct patient care [1]. The rest goes to EHR administrative tasks: order entry, documentation, prior authorizations, with 43% of their time spent on a clinical computer [2]
