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Announcement
· Sep 15, 2025
Winners of the Demo Games 2025

Hi Community,

We're super excited and thankful to our 52 InterSystems colleagues who participated in the 📺 Demo Games for InterSystems Sales Engineers 📺 and created 19 amazing videos.

Our colleagues worldwide put their creativity, technical know-how, and demo magic to the test. What started as an internal contest to showcase technical skill and demo excellence became a true stage for imagination with some entries looking less like demos and more like short films, complete with acting, storytelling, and even a cinematic touch.

Also, we'd like to thank all the members of the Community who took the time to watch them and vote for their favourites!

And now it's time to announce the winners!

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Article
· Feb 13, 2025 4m read
Bulk FHIR Step by Step

FHIR repositories, applications and servers typically serve clinical data in small quantities, whether to return data about a patient, their medications, vaccines, allergies, among other information. However, it is common for a large amount of data in FHIR/JSON format to be requested to be used to load into Data Lakes, identifying study cohorts, population health, or transferring data from one EHR to another. To meet these business scenarios that require large extractions and loads of data, it is recommended to use the FHIR Bulk Data Access feature provided by HL7 institution.

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After so many years of waiting, we finally got an official driver available on Pypi

Additionally, found JDBC driver finally available on Maven already for 3 months, and .Net driver on Nuget more than a month.

As an author of so many implementations of IRIS support for various Python libraries, I wanted to check it. Implementation of DB-API means that it should be replaceable and at least functions defined in the standard. The only difference should be in SQL.

And the beauty of using already existing libraries, that they already implemented other databases by using DB-API standard, and these libraries already expect how driver should work.

I decided to test InterSystems official driver by implementing its support in SQLAlchemy-iris library.

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So, you checked your server and saw that IRISTEMP is growing too much. There's no need to panic. Let’s investigate the issue before your storage runs out.

Step 1: Confirm the IRISTEMP Growth Issue

Before assuming IRISTEMP is the problem, let’s check its actual size.

Check the Free Space

Run the following command in the IRIS terminal:

%SYS>do ^%FREECNT

When prompted, enter:

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Article
· Feb 14, 2025 5m read
HTTP and HTTPS with REST API

HTTP and HTTPS with REST API

Hello

The HTTP protocol allows you to obtain resources, such as HTML documents. It is the basis of any data exchange on the Web and a client-server protocol, meaning that requests are initiated by the recipient, usually a Web browser.

REST APIs take advantage of this protocol to exchange messages between client and server. This makes REST APIs fast, lightweight, and flexible. REST APIs use the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and others to indicate the actions they want to perform.

When we make a call to a RESt API, what actually happens is an HTTP call. The API receives this call and according to the requested verb and path, the API performs the desired action. In the case of the Iris implementation we can see this clearly in the URLMap definition area:

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Hi Community!

We know that every developer has small side projects — apps where you experiment with new technologies, test ideas before implementing them in bigger solutions, or just build something fun for the sake of curiosity. But what if one of those projects could take you all the way to the InterSystems READY 2025?

We’re launching a unique opportunity: show us your passion, creativity, and love for IRIS, and win a free pass to the InterSystems READY + hotel accommodation!

The rules are simple: upload your fun IRIS-based side project to Open Exchange, and record a short inspirational video about why you should be the one to get the pass to THE event of the year and win!

Duration: April 21 - May 04, 2025

Prizes: hotel accommodation and free passes to the InterSystems READY 2025!

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Overview

The typeorm-iris project provides experimental support for integrating TypeORM with InterSystems IRIS, enabling developers to interact with IRIS using TypeORM’s well-known decorators and repository abstractions. This allows a more familiar development experience for JavaScript and TypeScript developers building Node.js applications with IRIS as the backend database.

TypeORM MongoDB Review. I recently started using TypeORM in a… | by Eliezer  Steinbock | Medium

While the project implements key integration points with TypeORM and supports basic entity operations, it’s not yet battle-tested or suitable for production environments.

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InterSystems Official
· May 21, 2025
InterSystems Platforms Update Q2-2025

We have a big update this quarter.

  • RHEL 10 was released yesterday, read on for what that means for you
  • 2025.3 will use OpenSSL 3 across all operating systems SUSE 15 sp6 will be the minimum OS for orgs using SUSE
  • The minimum CPU standards are going up in 2025.3
  • Older Windows Server operating systems will no longer be supported in 2025.3

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InterSystems Official
· Jul 14, 2025
Advisory for IRISSECURITY in InterSystems IRIS 2025.2

InterSystems IRIS 2025.2 introduces the IRISSECURITY database, the new home for security data. Unlike IRISSYS, the previous home for security data, IRISSECURITY can be encrypted, which secures your sensitive data at rest. In a future version, IRISSECURITY will be mirrorable.

This version also introduces the %SecurityAdministrator role for general security administration tasks.

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Article
· May 12, 2025 7m read
An Overview of Database Degrade

Introduction

Hello! In this article, I will be discussing database degrade, a type of data integrity issue one can face when using IRIS. First, I will be going over a review of the structure of IRIS databases. I'll then discuss how database degrade can manifest and common causes of degrade issues. I'll then conclude with general tips we give our customers about how to prevent or prepare for database degrade issues.

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Hello!!!

Data migration often sounds like a simple "move data from A to B task" until you actually do it. In reality, it is a complex process that blends planning, validation, testing, and technical precision.

Over several projects where I handled data migration into a HIS which runs on IRIS (TrakCare), I realized that success comes from a mix of discipline and automation.

Here are a few points which I want to highlight.

1. Start with a Defined Data Format.

Before you even open your first file, make sure everyone, especially data providers, clearly understands the exact data format you expect. Defining templates early avoids unnecessary bank-and-forth and rework later.

While Excel or CSV formats are common, I personally feel using a tab-delimited text file (.txt) for data upload is best. It's lightweight, consistent, and avoids issues with commas inside text fields.

PatID   DOB Gender  AdmDate
10001   2000-01-02  M   2025-10-01
10002   1998-01-05  F   2025-10-05
10005   1980-08-23  M   2025-10-15

Make sure that the date formats given in the file is correct and constant throughout the file because all these files are usually converted from an Excel file and an Basic excel user might make mistakes while giving you the date formats wrong. Wrong date formats can irritate you while converting into horolog.

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Article
· Apr 15, 2025 6m read
FHIR environment setup guide

I know that people who are completely new to VS Code, Git, Docker, FHIR, and other tools can sometimes struggle with setting up the environment. So I decided to write an article that walks through the entire setup process step by step to make it easier to get started.

I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a comment at the end - let me know if the instructions were clear, if anything was missing, or if there’s anything else you'd find helpful.

The setup includes:

✅ VS Code – Code editor
✅ Git – Version control system
✅ Docker – Runs an instance of IRIS for Health Community
✅ VS Code REST Client Extension – For running FHIR API queries
✅ Python – For writing FHIR-based scripts
✅ Jupyter Notebooks – For AI and FHIR assignments

Before you begin: Ensure you have administrator privileges on your system.

In addition to reading the guide, you can also follow the steps in the videos:

For Windows

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IyvuHbxCwCY
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Who hasn't been developing a beautiful example using a Docker IRIS image and had the image generation process fail in the Dockerfile because the license under which the image was created doesn't contain certain privileges?

In my case, what I was deploying in Docker is a small application that uses the Vector data type. With the Community version, this isn't a problem because it already includes Vector Search and vector storage. However, when I changed the IRIS image to a conventional IRIS (the latest-cd), I found that when I built the image, including the classes it had generated, it returned this error:

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Hey Community!

Here's the recap of the final half-day of the InterSystems Ready 2025! It was the last chance to see everyone and say farewell until next time.

It was a warm and energetic closing, with great conversations, smiles, and unforgettable memories!


The final Ready 2025 moment with our amazing team!

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Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, organizations deploying mission-critical applications must implement robust security architectures that protect sensitive data while maintaining high availability and performance. This is especially crucial for enterprises utilizing advanced database management systems like InterSystems IRIS, which often powers applications handling highly sensitive healthcare, financial, or personal data.

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Article
· Apr 22, 2025 7m read
Set, Get, and Don't Fret with JSON

The Good Old Days

The %Library.DynamicObject class has been in IRIS since before it became IRIS. If you have been using it since the Cache days, you may want to brush up on some of its changes.

In Cache 2018, the %Get method only had one argument. It was the key to retrieving from the JSON, meaning that if your JSON object called myObj, it would look like the following:

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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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Summer is coming to an end, and we’re sure you had plenty of highlights! ✨

Maybe you learned something valuable, got yourself a reward on Global Masters, or even joined READY 2025 🎉

Here’s a quick checklist — but you can, of course, share anything else about your summer in the comments. Photos are more than welcome 📸

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Background:

This guideline provides an overview of how to design and implement a REST API interface for querying patient demographic data from an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system using HealthConnect. The process involves sending a query request with the patient's identification number, retrieving the response from the EPR system, extracting the required patient demographic data from the HL7 message, and sending it as a JSON response to the supplier. The high-level process diagram is shown below (Screenshot 1).

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Article
· Apr 28, 2025 2m read
Minimum IRIS container footprint

Sometimes customers need a small IRIS instance to do something in the cloud and shut it down, or they need hundreds of containers (i.e. one per end user or one per interface) with small workloads. This exercise came about to see how small an IRIS instance could be. For this exercise we focused on what is the smallest amount of memory we can configure for an IRIS instance. Do you know all the parameters that affect the memory allocated by IRIS ?

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Hi developers!

Observing the avalanche of AI-driven and vibe-coding developer tools that have been appearing lately almost every month with more and more exciting dev features, I was puzzled whether it is possible to leverage it with InterSystems IRIS. At least to build a frontend. And the answer - yes! At least with the approach I followed.

Here is my recipe to prompt the UI vs InterSystems IRIS Backend:

  1. Have the REST API on the IRIS side, which reflects some Open API (swagger) spec.
  2. Generate the UI with any vibe-coding tool (e.g., Lovable) and point the UI to the REST API endpoint.
  3. Profit!

Here is the result of my own exercise - a 100% prompted UI vs IRIS REST API that allows to list, create, update delete entries of a persistent class (Open Exchange, frontend source, video):

What is the recipe in detail?

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It helps to remove special characters, such as non-utf-8 characters either control characters or unicode characters from text that is not printable or can't be parsed by downstream systems.

There is also $C(32) in this condition; sometimes NBSP appears in the text and it will not be recognized by TIE, but downstream it displays as "?".

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Article
· Jun 19, 2025 10m read
Towards Smarter Table Statistics

This article describes a significant enhancement of how InterSystems IRIS deals with table statistics, a crucial element for IRIS SQL processing, in the 2025.2 release. We'll start with a brief refresher on what table statistics are, how they are used, and why we needed this enhancement. Then, we'll dive into the details of the new infrastructure for collecting and saving table statistics, after which we'll zoom in onto what the change means in practice for your applications. We'll end with a few additional notes on patterns enabled by the new model, and look forward to the follow-on phases of this initial delivery.

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Here at InterSystems, we often deal with massive datasets of structured data. It’s not uncommon to see customers with tables spanning >100 fields and >1 billion rows, each table totaling hundred of GB of data. Now imagine joining two or three of these tables together, with a schema that wasn’t optimized for this specific use case. Just for fun, let’s say you have 10 years worth of EMR data from 20 different hospitals across your state, and you’ve been tasked with finding….

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