Hi Community,

On December 7, 2025, the InterSystems Developer Community officially celebrated its 10th anniversary! 🥳🎉

And now we honor this decade of learning, collaboration, problem-solving, and advancing InterSystems technologies. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or joined recently, thank you for your contributions, questions, ideas, and support. This milestone belongs to all of you 💖 You’ve built this community into what it is today, and we’re truly grateful!

As part of the celebration, we invited you to participate in a special anniversary video. And boy, you delivered! Thank you to everyone who took the time to share their greetings, memories, and kind words.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/oYjP3a3u8Io
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InterSystems Developer Community is a community of 25,473 amazing developers
We're a place where InterSystems IRIS programmers learn and share, stay up-to-date, grow together and have fun!
Learn more

As part of our 10-year celebration, we are pleased to recognize certain members whose long-standing contributions have significantly shaped the InterSystems Developer Community.

Over the past decade, these individuals have shared knowledge, supported peers, and helped strengthen the collaborative spirit that defines our Community.

To honor their impact, we are introducing a special set of 10th Anniversary Edition awards and Global Masters badges:

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Hi Community,

As part of our birthday celebration, we’ve put together a special timeline video showcasing the key milestones, growth, and achievements of the Developer Community and its Ecosystem over the past decade 🎆

Take a look at how far we’ve come, and how much we’ve built together:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/iZCfGAdWB2g
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Every thriving technical community has individuals whose curiosity, perseverance, and generosity help shape its collective knowledge. In the InterSystems Developer Community, one such contributor is @Scott Roth, who has been an inspiring presence for nearly a decade.

👏 Let’s take a closer look at Scott's remarkable journey and his impact on the InterSystems ecosystem.

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The most upvoted idea on the InterSystems Ideas Portal—garnering 74 votes—requests a lightweight version of IRIS. While the platform has grown into a powerful data engine, many projects require only its SQL database capabilities. This article demonstrates how to build an unofficial, compact IRIS Community Edition image focused solely on core database functionality, reducing the image size by over 80%.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This project produces an unofficial, experimental image of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

  • Not supported or endorsed by InterSystems.
  • Use at your own risk. The modifications remove core platform features and may break compatibility with tools, APIs, and expected behaviors.
  • No warranties or guarantees apply, including fitness for production use.
  • Intended only for educational and experimental purposes by advanced users.

Why a Lightweight IRIS?

While IRIS today includes rich functionality—interoperability, analytics, machine learning, system management, etc.—many projects only require its core SQL capabilities. The official Community Edition Docker image is approximately:

  • Disk usage: 3.5–3.8 GB
  • Compressed size: ~1.1 GB

IRIS Light reduces that to:

  • Disk usage: ~575–583 MB
  • Compressed size: ~144–148 MB

This makes it suitable for:

  • Microservice or containerized SQL use
  • CI pipelines with faster startup and pull
  • Horizontal scaling where full features are unnecessary

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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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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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As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we invite you to take part in a discussion reflecting on your experience with the InterSystems Developer Community.

Over the past decade, thousands of members have shaped this space through knowledge sharing, collaboration, and meaningful connections — and your voice is an integral part of that history.

We encourage you to join the conversation and share your story. In the comments, please tell us:

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Modern SQL engines are enormously complex pieces of software. Even when they appear stable and mature, subtle bugs can hide in their optimizers, type systems, predicate evaluation, or execution layers. These bugs rarely announce themselves loudly. Instead, they quietly produce incorrect results, behave inconsistently, or fail abruptly under specific combinations of SQL constructs.

This is precisely why tools like SQLancer exist. SQLancer automatically generates SQL queries and uses logical “oracles” to detect when a database behaves incorrectly. It has revealed hundreds of real bugs in widely used systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB.

With this in mind, I attempted to bring SQLancer to InterSystems IRIS, starting with the NOREC oracle — a powerful method for detecting optimizer correctness issues. The journey, however, uncovered not just potential SQL correctness problems, but also a surprising number of driver-level and server-level failures that prevented SQLancer from running at full strength.

This article summarizes why SQLancer is important, how the NOREC oracle works, and what unexpected findings appeared while testing IRIS.

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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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Article
· Dec 3 28m read
Security in IRIS

Security is fundamental to enterprise application development. InterSystems IRIS provides a comprehensive security framework that protects data, controls access, and ensures compliance. This guide introduces essential security features for developers new to IRIS, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and practical implementation strategies.

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Hi Community!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the "Improving the Initial Developer Experience" sweepstakes! Your feedback is invaluable in making InterSystems products better, and we will use your ideas to improve our offerings. Now, it's time to announce the winner - watch the video to see the sweepstake drawing:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/d2ye_mnBxZo
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In the previous article, we talked about ODBC and connecting from C#. And now, let's look at JDBC and Java. The InterSystems JDBC driver is the recommended, high-performance way to integrate your Java applications.

Here is a step-by-step guide to getting your Java application connected to an IRIS instance using the JDBC driver.

Step 1: Obtain and Include the InterSystems IRIS JDBC Driver

Unlike ODBC drivers, which are often installed system-wide, JDBC drivers are typically distributed as JAR files that must be included in your Java project's classpath.

If InterSystems IRIS is installed on your local machine or another you have access to, you can find the file in install-dir/dev/java/lib/ or similar, where install-dir is the installation directory for the instance. Conversely, you can download the jar file from Driver packages page.

Or as suggested by @Dmitry Maslennikov in the comments, use the maven central repository for Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intersystems</groupId>
    <artifactId>intersystems-jdbc</artifactId>
    <version>3.10.5</version>
</dependency>

or for Gradle:

implementation("com.intersystems:intersystems-jdbc:3.10.5")

Include the jar file in Project:

  • Maven/Gradle: If you use a build tool, the simplest method is to add the InterSystems JDBC driver as a dependency in your pom.xml or build.gradle file. This automatically downloads and manages the JAR.
  • Manual: For simple projects, you must place the JAR file in a project directory (e.g., /lib) and explicitly add it to your classpath when compiling and running.

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Project Overview / Introduction

Developing and testing REST APIs in InterSystems IRIS often requires a significant amount of boilerplate code. While ObjectScript provides powerful tools for building APIs, writing consistent and repeatable tests can be time‑consuming. This is where IrisOASTestGen comes in.

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We are a group of interface analysts in a healthcare setting, running IRIS for Health 2024, having upgraded over time from an old ENSEMBLE environment. We have been working on a wish list of development goals, but are having trouble finding the correct, best practice method/path for getting to what we envision.

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Article
· Dec 4 6m read
Sub-Table Security

InterSystems IRIS provides extensive configurable security options, yet many developers primarily use roles and resources to secure entire tables or routines. Today, we will delve deeper. We can also secure individual columns and rows separately, but these two mechanisms operate very differently. Let's begin with the columns.

Column Security

For testing and demonstration, we will keep our table structure concise and straightforward. We have a table called "Person" in the USER namespace that contains an ID column, a date of birth column (DOB), first name, and last name.

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In some cases, it's necessary to manipulate data from one namespace to another. For example, a routine in the "N1" namespace needs data from the "N2" namespace. In legacy systems (using only globals), it's common to make the global universal, but what about persistent classes? Is this type of globalization also possible?

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I'm pleased to announce the publication of gj :: dataLoader, a new VS Code extension that simplifies the task of loading data from local CSV files into SQL tables on your InterSystems IRIS servers.

Here's an introductory video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XohVoW5rSy4
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