Article
· Apr 26, 2020 5m read
Materialized Views

A VIEW in SQL is basically a prepared SQL statement.
It has to be executed and assembled like any other SQL query.
MATERIALIZED VIEW means that the content is collected before hands and can be retrieved rather fast.
I saw the concept first with my favorite competitor named O* and they made a lot of noise about it.

{ favorite: because I could win every benchmark against them devil }

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Article
· Mar 3, 2016 2m read
Class Projections and Projection Classes

The purpose of this post is to raise the profile of a powerful mechanism that has long been available to us, and to open a discussion about ways in which it can be used or abused.

You can read more detail about the mechanism here. To summarize, your class definition can use the Projection keyword to reference one or more projection classes. A projection class can implement methods that get invoked at key points in the lifecycle of your class.

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InterSystems SAM is a great tool to monitor your InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS For Health clusters on prem or in a cloud environment. This article describes how you can implement a customized alert handler. This is currently an undocumented and most likely an unknown feature of InterSystems SAM. With future releases it will be probably made easier to leverage this useful concept.

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Article
· Jun 12, 2021 2m read
Running reviews on Open Exchange

For several weeks I'm creating reviews on OEX.
So I'd like to explain to you the criteria that I apply to find my ratings.
Of course, each reviewer is an independent person and has his own criteria and his own opinion.
And that's good and important! As Winston Churchill once said:

"If 2 people always have the same opinion, then 1 of them is superfluous"

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Here are a few examples of conversions and operations you might need, along with links to documentation where you can learn more.

At the time I wrote this, Eastern Daylight Time was in effect for my Caché system.

How Caché keeps the time and date

Caché has a simple time format, with a longer range of recognized dates compared to some other technologies.

The current time is maintained in a special variable $HOROLOG ($H):

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Some key points are emphasized in this article in order to save your time to get linux ldap client in cache working with windows AD (active directory) LDAP server.
The first thing to do is to get successful TLS connection to windows AD.
Raw tcp case is beyond of this article, there is no problem with it, it is trivial.
Windows ldap server uses port 636 for tls and this port can be used to get ldap certificate.
As we will see later there is reason for this.
linux ldap client uses STARTTLS special ldap extension to switch plain tcp to TLS only.

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Article
· Feb 15, 2021 17m read
Four Database APIs

A concurrent session in IRIS:
SQL, Objects, REST, and GraphQL

Kazimir Malevich, "Athletes" (1932)

"But of course you don't understand! How can a person who has always traveled in a horse-drawn carriage understand the feelings and impressions of the express traveler or the pilot in the air?"

Kazimir Malevich (1916)

Introduction

We’ve already addressed the topic of why object/type representation is superior to SQL for implementing subject area models. And those conclusions and facts are as true now as they have ever been. So why should we take a step back and discuss technologies that drag abstractions back to the global level, where they had been in the pre-object and pre-type era? Why should we encourage the use of spaghetti code, which results in bugs that are hard to track down, and which relies only on virtuoso developer skills?

There are several arguments in favor of transmitting data via SQL/REST/GraphQL-based APIs as opposed to representing them as types/objects:

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Google has one intersting tool named Data Studio. This tool allows creating some interactive dashboards, based on your data, available from the internet. It already offers hundreds of connectors to any sort of data developed by the community. As well as some amount of community developed visualizing. And most importantly, Google offers a way to develop your own connector to your data.

FHIRaaS provides a REST API, and it's available from the internet. So I've decided to try to create some basic report on data stored there. And in the end, I got this.

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Introduction

In the first article, a simple tutorial helped you to set up your FHIRaaS deployment.

Now, let's move forward and introduce a JS library to access the FHIR resource.

In the end, two examples of usage of this library will be presented, exploring the Appointment FHIR resource type.

SMART on FHIR JavaScript Library

FHIR is a REST API, so you can use any HTTP client in order to use it. But, it’s always a good idea to have help.

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Article
· Jun 5, 2021 8m read
FHIRaaS overview

Introduction

This article aims to provide an overview of InterSystems IRIS FHIR Accelerator Service (FHIRaaS) driven by the implementation of application iris-on-fhir, available in OEX developed for the FHIRaaS contest.

A basic tutorial will guide you in configuring a function FHIRaaS deployment, including an API key and an OAuth 2.0 server.

A library to use FHIR resources through FHIRaaS also is briefly discussed.

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In this article, I will show how you can easily containerize .Net/Java Gateways.

For our example, we will develop an Integration with Apache Kafka.

And to interoperate with Java/.Net code we will use PEX .

Architecture

Our solution will run completely in docker and look like this:

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This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

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When using Studio, ODBC or a terminal connection to Caché or Ensemble, you may have wondered how to secure the connection. One option is to add TLS (aka SSL) to your connection. The Caché client applications - TELNET, ODBC and Studio - all understand how to add TLS to the connection. They just need to be configured to do it.

Configuring these clients is easier in 2015.1 and later. I'm going to be discussing this new method. If you're already using the old, legacy method, it will continue to work, but I would recommend you consider switching to the new one.

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Article
· May 28, 2021 1m read
Fetch Upstream in GitHub

Hi colleagues!

Often when we collaborate to someone's repo in GitHub we do the following cycle:

Fork-Clone-Change-Commit-Push-Pull-Request-Merge to the original repo.

This is all great and works fine!

And if we want to make a second collaboration right after the merge you need to perform "Fetch upstream" to your forked repo first to "ingest" your own Pull-request in the original repo.

Geeky git-professionals do it with ease but this was always a headache for me so I usually simply deleted the fork and created a new one.

And today I figured that Github added a new UI feature that I can easily fetch-upstream for my fork with the original one and make it up to date and capable for pull-requests.

Here is where the button is:

This is a relief! )

Wanted to share this relief and productivity tip with you!

Bring more collaborations to Github repos!

And speaking of PR - I just made a PR with docker to Google Cloud Run deployment for the FHIRaaS demo made by @Anton Umnikov for the current FHIR Contest! Looking for more of your contributions!

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Hi Developers!
Let me share with you some exercises from a workshop about developing interoperability components in Java using PEX (Production EXtension).

You will find slides and step by step exercises about:

  • Understanding simple PEX components coded in Java.
  • Making some changes on them.

All built using containers, so you don't need to build a local Java environment.

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Article
· May 24, 2021 1m read
Data Platform Levels

It's a challenge when you need, as a software architect, design a corporate architecture to meet the current business requirements, you need achieve level 5. With InterSystems IRIS.
it's possible. With 1 product you get SQL + NoSQL + ESB + BI + Open Analytics + Real time virtual cubes + NLP + AutoML + ML (with Python) and Advanced cloud + Sharding support.

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At the heart of IRIS and Cache is a very interesting database architecture that we, at M/Gateway Developments, refer to as "Global Storage". If you ever wanted to know more about the fundamentals and capabilities of this underlying database, you might want to read a major analysis we've put together:

https://github.com/robtweed/global_storage

Amongst other things you'll discover that:

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Let's imagine if you would like to write some real web application, for instance, some simple clone of medium.com. Such sort of application can be written using any different language on the backend side, or with any framework on the frontend side. So many ways to do the same application, and you can look at this project. Which offers a bunch of frontends and backends realizations for exactly the same application. And you can easily mix them, any chosen frontend should work with any backend.

Let me introduce the same application realization for InterSystems IRIS on a backend side.

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When you have been using cubes for business intelligence in a namespace for some time, you may find that there are many cubes in the namespace, only some of which are actively being used. However, it can be difficult to tell which cubes users are or are not querying, and maintaining unused cubes can be costly both in terms of storage and of computation to keep them up to date. This article provides some suggestions and examples for monitoring which cubes are in active use, and for removing cubes that you determine are no longer necessary.

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Article
· May 11, 2021 8m read
IRIS in Astronomy

In this article we are going to show the results of the comparision between IRIS and Postgress when handling Astronomy data.

Introduction

Since the earliest days of human civilization we have been fascinated by the sky at night. There are so many stars! Everybody has dreamed about them and fantasized about life in other planets.

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In this 3-part series of articles, is shown how you can use IAM to simply add security, according to OAuth 2.0 standards, to a previously unauthenticated service deployed in IRIS.

In the first part, was provided some OAuth 2.0 background together with some IRIS and IAM initial definitions and configurations in order to facilitate the understanding of the whole process of securing your services.

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Over the last couple of weeks the Solution Architecture team has been working to finish off our 2019 workload: this included open-sourcing the Readmission Demo that was brought to HIMSS last year, so we could make it available to anyone looking for an interactive-way of exploring the tooling provided by IRIS.

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Article
· Apr 26, 2021 3m read
SSH for IRIS container

Why SSH ?

If you do not have direct access to the server that runs your IRIS Docker container
you still may require access to the container outside "iris session" or "WebTerminal".
With an SSH terminal (PuTTY, KiTTY,.. ) you get access inside Docker, and then, depending
on your needs you run "iris session iris" or display/manipulate files directly.

Note:
This is not meant to be the default access for the average application user
but the emergency backdoor for System Management, Support, and Development.

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Earlier this year, the AppS.REST package was released. AppS.REST is a framework for easily exposing existing persistent classes in IRIS as REST resources. AppS.REST-enabled classes support CRUD operations with little effort from the developer, bridging the gap between persistent data in IRIS and data consumers, such as an Angular front end application.

But IRIS classes are much more than just a definition for loading and saving individual records! This article aims to highlight a few ways to leverage the power of IRIS in your REST applications. Using the Phone.Contact sample app, we'll look at out-of-the-box query support, use of class queries and finally ObjectScript methods.

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