Migrating from Oracle, MSSQL, or other purely relational database systems to a multimodel InterSystems IRIS is a strategic decision that requires careful planning and execution. While this transition offers significant benefits, including enhanced performance, scalability, and support for modern architectures, it also comes with challenges. In this article I will highlight some of the considerations connected to coding to ensure a successful migration. I will leave everything connected to an actual migration of structures and data outside the scope of this article.


First, when you're considering migrating to a different database system, you need to understand your business logic, whether it's on the side of the application (application server) or the database server. Basically, where do you have your SQL statements that you will need to potentially rewrite?

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InterSystems Developer Community is a community of 26,053 amazing developers
We're a place where InterSystems IRIS programmers learn and share, stay up-to-date, grow together and have fun!

Migrating InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health from on-premises to the cloud offers many advantages for Application Providers and Solution Providers. These advantages include simplified operations, access to flexible resources, and enhanced resilience. Companies no longer need to worry about the physical constraints and expenses associated with maintaining on-prem infrastructure, such as power and space requirements and expensive computer hardware.

One of the most compelling benefits is the ability to accelerate speed to market. By removing the burden of infrastructure maintenance, cloud environments enable faster development and deployment cycles, allowing businesses to respond quickly to market demands and opportunities. Operational costs are also lowered, because companies can scale resources up or down based on actual needs, leading to more efficient use of capital. Moreover, migrating to the cloud can contribute to a reduced carbon footprint by optimizing energy usage through shared cloud infrastructure.

Transitioning to the cloud may involve significant changes. Companies may benefit from a more operational focus, managing and optimizing cloud resources continuously. This shift may require changes to business models, reconsideration of margins, and strategies for scaling operations up or out. While requiring more investment, embracing these changes can lead to improved agility and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

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Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

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Discussion
· Dec 16, 2025
Code Golf: Binary encoding!

Time for another round of code golf!

Develop a function that performs a two-step encryption process on a given string:

  • First Step: Reverse Cipher

    • Reverse the entire input string.
    • Relocate the last character of the original string (now the first character of the reversed string) to the end.
  • Second Step: Alphabetic Index Binary Encoding

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High-Performance Message Searching in Health Connect

The Problem

Have you ever tried to do a search in Message Viewer on a busy interface and had the query time out? This can become quite a problem as the amount of data increases. For context, the instance of Health Connect I am working with does roughly 155 million Message Headers per day with 21 day message retention. To try and help with search performance, we extended the built-in SearchTable with commonly used fields in hopes that indexing these fields would result in faster query times. Despite this, we still couldn't get some of these queries to finish at all.

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Hi noble devs!

Just building a simple frontend->JSON->IRIS backend story, and figured that IRIS while importing via %JSON.Adaptor wants JSON fields to match property names, meaning even should match the case. Like:

{ name: "John", 

surname: "Doe"}

will have issues while saving the dynamic object to a class Sample.Person with:

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In this article, we will discuss all the debugging tools included in the Microsoft Visual Studio Code IDE.

What will be covered:

  • Breakpoints
  • Watch window
  • Call Stack

Let's start by learning about debugging requirements!

Prerequisites

There are two plugins (extensions) for debugging ObjectScript:

The first is part of the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack. The second is Serenji, a standalone plugin that provides an editor, file manager, and debugging functionality. Both plugins can be installed from the plugin store. To activate key functionality, Serenji requires a license. For this article, we'll use the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack to reduce the learning curve. After you've mastered the basics, you can consider purchasing a paid license for Serenji.

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This article presents a potential solution for semantic code search in TrakCare using IRIS Vector Search.

Here's a brief overview of results from the TrakCare Semantic code search for the query: "Validation before database object save".

  • Code Embedding model

There are numerous embedding models designed for sentences and paragraphs, but they are not ideal for code specific embeddings.

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Having been inspired with Shared code execution speed question/discussion, I dare to ask another one which is annoying me and my colleagues for several weeks.

We have a routine called Lib that comprises 200 $$-functions of 1500 code lines total. It was noticed that after calling _any_ function of another rather big routine (1900 functions, 32000 lines) the next call of $$someFunction^Lib(x) is getting 10-20% slower than previous call of the same function. This effect doesn't depend on:

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Hi developers!

This will be a very short article as in April 2025 with Lovable and other Prompt-to-UI tools it becomes possible to build the frontend with prompting. Even to the folks like me who is not familiar with modern UI techics at all.

Well, I know at least the words javascript, typescript and ReactJS, so in this very short article we will be building the ReactJS UI to InterSystems FHIR server with Lovable.ai.

Let's go!

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Article
· May 29, 2025 8m read
Integrate with Google Forms

Google Forms is the most popular solution on the market for collecting data, answering questionnaires and quizzes. So, it is the ideal solution for collecting patient data and responses in a practical way, without the need to expand or develop systems. In this article, I will detail how to create an account on Google Cloud, register the application that will consume the Google Forms API, generate the service user necessary to consume the API and finally perform actions to create new forms and collect data filled in them in an automated way in embedded Python and IRIS.

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Window functions in InterSystems IRIS let you perform powerful analytics — like running totals, rankings, and moving averages — directly in SQL.
They operate over a "window" of rows related to the current row, without collapsing results like GROUP BY.
This means you can write cleaner, faster, and more maintainable queries — no loops, no joins, no temp tables.

In this article let's understand the mechanics of window functions by addressing some common data analisys tasks.

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Apache Airflow is the leading open-source platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines and workflows using Python. Workflows are defined as code (DAGs), making them version-controlled, testable, and reusable. With a rich UI, 100+ built-in operators, dynamic task generation, and native support for cloud providers, Airflow powers ETL/ELT, ML pipelines, and batch jobs at companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Spotify.

Airflow Application Layout

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Introduction

InterSystems IRIS allows you to build REST APIs using ObjectScript classes and the %CSP.REST framework. This enables the development of modern services to expose data for web apps, mobile apps, or system integrations.

In this article, you'll learn how to create a basic REST API in InterSystems IRIS, including:

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Hi Community,

Watch this short exercise in writing basic code snippets in InterSystems ObjectScript using Copilot in VSCode and the GPT-4.0 engine. This screencast covers "Hello, World," global manipulation, class creation, and building a simple REST API application.

>> Coding InterSystems ObjectScript with Copilot <<

🗣 Presenter: @Evgeny Shvarov, Senior Manager of Developer and Startup Programs, InterSystems

📌 The related code can be found here: objectscript-copilot-demo.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CanxHvMZyLY
[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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Article
· Oct 22, 2025 2m read
Tips on handling Large data

Hello community,

I wanted to share my experience about working on Large Data projects. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to handle massive patient data, payor data and transactional logs while working in an hospital industry. I have had the chance to build huge reports which had to be written using advanced logics fetching data across multiple tables whose indexing was not helping me write efficient code.

Here is what I have learned about managing large data efficiently.

Choosing the right data access method.

As we all here in the community are aware of, IRIS provides multiple ways to access data. Choosing the right method, depends on the requirement.

  • Direct Global Access: Fastest for bulk read/write operations. For example, if i have to traverse through indexes and fetch patient data, I can loop through the globals to process millions of records. This will save a lot of time.
Set ToDate=+H
Set FromDate=+$H-1 For  Set FromDate=$O(^PatientD("Date",FromDate)) Quit:FromDate>ToDate  Do
. Set PatId="" For  Set PatId=$Order(^PatientD("Date",FromDate,PatID)) Quit:PatId=""  Do
. . Write $Get(^PatientD("Date",FromDate,PatID)),!
  • Using SQL: Useful for reporting or analytical requirements, though slower for huge data sets.

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I am regularly contacted by customers about memory sizing when they get alerts that free memory is below a threshold, or they observe that free memory has dropped suddenly. Is there a problem? Will their application stop working because it has run out of memory for running system and application processes? Nearly always, the answer is no, there is nothing to worry about. But that simple answer is usually not enough. What's going on?

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I am receiving the garbled text due to incorrect encoding or decoding. I tried to use the $zconvert function to convert it into the normal text but failed to do that. Can anybody suggest what I have to use to convert that into normal text?

Example: Garbled text that I am getting is "canââ¬â¢t , theyââ¬â¢re".

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