As an IT and cloud team manager with 18 years of experience with InterSystems technologies, I recently led our team in the transformation of our traditional on-premises ERP system to a cloud-based solution. We embarked on deploying InterSystems IRIS within a Kubernetes environment on AWS EKS, aiming to achieve a scalable, performant, and secure system. Central to this endeavor was the utilization of the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) as our ingress controller.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention lately because it can change many areas of our lives. Better computer power and more data have helped AI do amazing things, like improving medical tests and making self-driving cars. AI can also help businesses make better decisions and work more efficiently, which is why it's becoming more popular and widely used. How can one integrate the OpenAI API calls into an existing IRIS Interoperability application?

If you are a customer of the new InterSystems IRIS® Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS® Cloud IntegratedML® cloud offerings and want access to the metrics of your deployments and send them to your own Observability platform, here is a quick and dirty way to get it done by sending the metrics to Google Cloud Platform Monitoring (formerly StackDriver).

We all know that having a set of proper test data before deploying an application to production is crucial for ensuring its reliability and performance. It allows to simulate real-world scenarios and identify potential issues or bugs before they impact end-users. Moreover, testing with representative data sets allows to optimize performance, identify bottlenecks, and fine-tune algorithms or processes as needed. Ultimately, having a comprehensive set of test data helps to deliver a higher quality product, reducing the likelihood of post-production issues and enhancing the overall user experience. 

In this article, let's look at how one can use generative AI, namely Gemini by Google, to generate (hopefully) meaningful data for the properties of multiple objects. To do this, I will use the RESTful service to generate data in a JSON format and then use the received data to create objects.

Introduction

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free source code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It provides built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js. You can add extensions to provide support for numerous other languages including ObjectScript.

The InterSystems extensions enable you to use VS Code to connect to an InterSystems IRIS server and develop code in ObjectScript. The Visual Studio Code Documentation is an excellent resource on VS Code, so it is a good idea to be familiar with it.

SQLTools is a Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Extension with over 3.5 million downloads that provides connections to many of the most used databases, including InterSystems IRIS, using drivers. 
For developers new to VS Code, or those already familiar with it but are looking to streamline their connections to InterSystems IRIS, this tutorial will take you through installing the SQLTools extensions and the InterSystems IRIS drive. It then guides you on how to establish a connection to your instance of InterSystems IRIS and run a query.

Hi community,

The aim of this article is to explain how to create messaging between IRIS and Microsoft Teams.

In my company, we wanted to monitor error messages, and we used the Ens.Alert class to redirect those error messages through a Business Operation that sent an email.
The problem was that we sent those error messages to a support account where there were many emails. We wanted something specific for a specific team.

So we investigated how to make these messages reach the development team directly and they could have, in real time, a notification of an error in our production.
In our company we use Microsoft Teams as a corporate tool, so we asked ourselves: How could we make these messages reach the IRIS development team?

Recently, the question came up while discussing the access to the data stored in IRIS from different languages with my students if it was possible to initiate the connection and get data from Cloud solution (InterSystems IRIS CloudSQL) from Microsoft Excel, not the other way around. Considering the many varied ways one can get data in Excel (import data from external sources, connecting to databases using ODBC drivers, using power queries and web queries etc.) the obvious choice was to try ODBC driver. The only task left was to try to connect to the database in the cloud using the ODBC driver.

Introduction

In the next few weeks, my coworkers are planning to start using VSCode to code with InterSystems' products. Among the many advantages of that, I would emphasize being able to connect with other technologies, such as GitHub, with ease. Besides, VSCode also offers an extensive extensions store, where you can find many free add-ons that make coding faster and more efficient. Last but not least, to conquer the heart of every developer, it is open source.

With that being said, let's start the tutorial. Feel free to skip some steps if you're comfortable doing them alone.

Introduction

As the health interoperability landscape expands to include data exchange across on-premise as well as hosted solutions, we are seeing an increased need to integrate with services such as cloud storage. One of the most prolifically used and well supported tools is the NoSQL database DynamoDB (Dynamo), provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The challenge for IRIS implementations, as it relates to Dynamo and other modern web services, is that there is no native support for interacting with Dynamo and AWS within ObjectScript.

One of the pain points for maintaining HL7 interfaces is the need to run a reliable regression test upon deployment to new environments and after upgrades. The %UnitTest class allows unit tests to be created and packaged alongside interface code. Test data can also be maintained within the unit test class, allowing for quick and easily repeatable smoke-testing and regression testing.

##Resources:

• Standard %UnitTest class

• This tutorial utilizes a modification of UnitTest-RuleSet by Alex Woodhead from the Open Exchange (https://openexchange.intersystems.com/package/UnitTest-RuleSet

Introduction

In the modern digital age, securing applications, particularly those handling sensitive health data, is paramount. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of such data are crucial, necessitating robust security measures. Two-factor authentication (2FA) stands out as a critical enhancement in safeguarding access, adding an extra layer of security beyond just passwords. Recognizing the significance of this feature, InterSystems provides built-in support for 2FA in its database solutions. This tutorial aims to guide you through the process of configuring two-factor authentication in your InterSystems environment, ensuring that your data remains secure and accessible only to authorized users.

What is Unstructured Data?
Unstructured data refers to information lacking a predefined data model or organization. In contrast to structured data found in databases with clear structures (e.g., tables and fields), unstructured data lacks a fixed schema. This type of data includes text, images, videos, audio files, social media posts, emails, and more.

Why Are Insights from Unstructured Data Important?
According to an IDC (International Data Corporation) report, 80% of worldwide data is projected to be unstructured by 2025, posing a significant concern for 95% of businesses.

BPL from 10,000 feet

BPL stands for Business Process Language.
This is an XML format for describing complex information orchestration interactions between systems.
InterSystems Integration engine has for two decades, provided a visual designer to build, configure, and maintain, BPL using a graphical interface.
Think of it like drawing a process flow diagram that can be compiled and deployed.

An example: Make a cup of tea

BPL components are added to Integration productions like any other built-in or custom business component.

Killer presentations are essential for opening doors, doing business and delighting customers. These types of presentations move away from the traditional and tiring topics and portions of texts, or even pictures of happy people to get closer to the interests of their audience.The best presentations materialize what customers are looking for into something they can see working. Instead of promises, examples in execution and the ability to be very close to what you want to do.

Introduction

There is a Link Procedure Wizard option within the Management Portal (System > SQL >Wizards > Link Procedure) which I had reliability issues with so I decided to use this solution instead.

Problem

You need to query an external SQL database to use the response within a namespace. This guide is assuming that you already have a working stored procedure in SSMS although you could instead use a SQL block within the operation. Stored procedures in SSMS are preferred to maintain integrity, Embedded SQL can get very confusing if you have a complicated SQL statement.

I have been walking through this with a few team members and as such I thought there might be others out there who could use it, especially if you work with HL7 & Ensemble/HealthConnect/HealthShare and never venture out past the Interoperability section. 

First, I would like to establish that this is an extension of the already established documentation on importing and exporting SQL data found here: https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20241/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GSQL_impexp#GSQL_impexp_import

Introduction

This is a quickstart guide to IRIS for Linux systems administrators who need to be able to support the IRIS DB as well as other normal infrastructure tasks.

IRIS is a DB system from Intersystems. An IRIS DB can hold code (in the form of a Class) or data (in the form of Globals). IRIS DB are Linux files called IRIS.DAT.

I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

• CR+LF is typical for Windows
• LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
• CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

In IRIS* similar as in Caché or Ensemble or .

Hi Community!

Do you usually work with automated tasks? Then let me share with you a pair of tips ;-)

Tip 1: How to know when my automated task will end (approximately)

Do you have an automated task that is running but you are not sure when it will end and you are at the crossroad of take the decision to stop it or wait and you are not sure if could be better wait for 5 o 10 minutes?

Here you are a tip to check when your task will finish (approximately).

What I find really useful about IRIS when teaching my subject of Postrelational databases is the fact that it is a multi model database. Which means that I can actually go into architecture and structure and all that only once but then show the usage of different models (like object, document, hierarchy) using the same language and approach. And it is not a huge leap to go from an object oriented programming language (like C#, Java etc) to an object oriented database.

However, along with advantages (which are many) come some drawbacks when we switch from object oriented model to relational. When I say that you can get access to the same data using different models I need to also explain how it is possible to work with lists and arrays from object model in relational table. With arrays it is very simple - by default they are represented as separate tables and that's the end of it. With lists - it's harder because by default it's a string. But one still wants to do something about it without damaging the structure and making this list unreadable in the object model.

So in this article I will showcase a couple of predicates and a function that are useful when working with lists, and not just as fields.