Cache tricks

Several years ago, long before Developer Community Portal was launched, I published a series of Caché tricks at one of Czech web sites. In this article, I’m posting translated version of one of them.

Capturing output of someone else’s methods or routines

Suppose you, or someone else created a useful method or routine, that was producing some computation that you’d like to benefit from, but the routine was writing output to process principal device.

You would like to use the data, but you need it not written to a device, but assigned to a variable. And, for any reason, you can’t modify the code. What can you do?

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Article
· Sep 21, 2016 7m read
REST in Pieces

A beginners guide to develop Ensemble RESTful web services.

Background

Before you start reading this short introduction please go through the on-line documentation of Ensemble with special attention to chapter “Creating REST services and clients with Ensemble”.

The approach in the documentation is undisputable the fastest and easiest way to create RESTful services. As a beginner I went through the documentation and I had several questions. This short article is listing those questions plus my humble answers.

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Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management.

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Article
· May 20, 2016 12m read
Collations in Caché

Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)

Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale.
Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).

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The Caché System Management Portal includes a robust web-based SQL query tool, but for some applications it’s more convenient to use a dedicated SQL client installed on a user’s PC.

SQuirreL SQL is a well known open source SQL client built in Java, which uses JDBC to connect to a DBMS. As such, we can configure SQuirreL to connect to Caché using the Caché JDBC driver.

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Those of you who keep an eye on developments in the mainstream of IT will be aware that a major upheaval has been occurring over the last 5 or so years, in which JavaScript has exploded in popularity and importance. Largely as a result of its server-side incarnation - Node.js - it has broken free of just being the scripting language that you use in web browser, to becoming the world's most popular language and enterprise technology of choice.

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Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky.

In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles.

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Article
· Oct 27, 2016 2m read
New WRC Customer Interface

New WRC Customer Interface

Come check out the new WRC interface we have made available to supported customer.

Some of the new features available to you are:

Organization Dashboard – gives an overview of your organizations activity for this year

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Starting with 2017.1, InterSystems is adding Ubuntu (64-bit) as a third linux server platform. Prior to 2017.1 Ubuntu was already available as a development platform and customers could use InterSystems distributions build for SUSE to run on Ubuntu. As a result there are a few license key implications for 64-bit linux versions starting with Caché and Ensemble 2017.1:

a) Customers using RedHat will observe no changes

b) Customers using InterSystems products(1) for SUSE on SUSE will need new license keys (no charge)

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Article
· Feb 19, 2016 4m read
Why Atelier? And what about Studio?

I have been meaning to make a post about this topic for a few weeks and the other day an issue came in through the WRC about it so it seems this is a conversation we should be having. I want to begin by taking a few moments to explain "Why Atelier" then we can talk about what this means in the general sense for Studio and Atelier and Caché developers. We have wrestled with what to do with Studio for years. When I moved to Product Management in 2008 this was already a "thing". At the time we could not reach a consensus. Some felt Studio was fine as is.

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A few customers have seen this happen, so I thought it would be worth mentioning here on the Developer Community. This could affect users running versions between 2014.1.3 and latest who install or upgrade Wireshark. There is a bug in the Visual C++ 2013 redistributable shipped with the current Wireshark 2.2.1.

This is from Microsoft’s bug report https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3138367 :

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Article
· Dec 22, 2016 2m read
The Polymetric Dashboard

> Customizable System Monitoring. ## Introduction The Polymetric Dashboard is a stand-alone module that provides enhanced monitoring tools for a Caché environment. Equipped with over one hundred sensors that monitor key system metrics, a robust REST API, and a modular AngularJS user interface, the Polymetric Dashboard is fully functional out of the box. However, the Polymetric Dashboard is designed to be customizable; any system metric can be monitored by creating a new sensor, and the visualization of collected data can be tailored to specific requirements and purposes.

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Mirroring 101

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive, and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. Mirroring provides automatic failover under a broad range of planned and unplanned outage scenarios, with application recovery time typically limited to seconds. Logical data replication eliminates storage as a single point of failure and a source of data corruption. Upgrades can be executed with little or no downtime.

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One of the great availability and scaling features of Caché is Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). With consideration during application development distributed processing using ECP allows a scale out architecture for Caché applications. Application processing can scale to very high rates from a single application server to the processing power of up to 255 application servers with no application changes.

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Article
· Oct 18, 2016 7m read
Macros in the InterSystems Caché

In this article I would like to tell you about macros in InterSystems Caché. A macro is a symbolic name that is replaced with a set of instructions during compilation. A macro can “unfold” in various instruction sets each time it is called, depending on the parameters passed to it and activated scenarios. This can be both static code and the result of ObjectScript execution. Let's take a look at how you can use them in your application.

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Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Warning: if you get confused by URLs used: the original series used screens from machine called dk-gs2016. The new screenshots are taken from a different machine. You can safely treat url WIN-U9J96QBJSAG as if it was dk-gs2016.

Part 2. Authorization server, OpenID Connect server

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Article
· Jul 14, 2016 1m read
Caché Haiku

Alex Koblov posted today a #CachéHaiku:

Full command names

Make your code more readable

Than compact versions

My haiku:

Caché Globals

Shows you keys to the value

If you $order it

Your variant? ;)

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Article
· Nov 9, 2016 5m read
How the Ensemble Scheduler Works

The Ensemble Scheduler is used for automatically turning on and off business hosts at certain dates and times. You could use it if, for example, you wanted to only run a business host from 9am to 5pm every day. Conversely, if you want do to trigger an event to occurr at a specific time, for example, a job running at 1am to batch up and send off all the previous day's transactions in one file, we recommend other methods such as the Task Manager.

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What is a core file? and When are they use­ful?

The in­for­ma­tion in this doc­u­ment is cur­rent as ver­sions of In­ter­Sys­tems prod­ucts re­leased through 2019–06–30. This up­date cov­ers er­rors in that have been dis­cov­ered up to 2023-01-12, but not changes present in new ver­sions of In­ter­Sys­tems prod­ucts.

Nev­er­the­less, the de­tails for ex­ist­ing prod­ucts are not sub­ject to fre­quent change.

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Article
· Jun 24, 2016 2m read
Atelier, Git, and GitHub

One of the benefits of Atelier is easy integration with source code management tools. Some Eclipse installations include the EGit plugin, or you can install it from the Eclipse marketplace. EGIt makes integration with Git and GitHub easy. Here are the steps I used to connect Atelier to a GitHub repository:

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For the first time, InterSystems Global Summit is being held in September – September 10-13th, 2017.
And it’s being held at a new venue, the beautiful JW Marriott Desert Palms in Palm Springs, CA.

Global Summit 2017 will have the Solution Developer Conference, Healthcare Leadership Conference (by invitation only), and Technology Leadership Conference (by invitation only).

Visit www.intersystems.com/summit17 for Summit pricing and hotel information.

Online registration and agendas will be coming soon.

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Article
· Nov 1, 2016 9m read
Reflection in Caché

The topic of reflection hasn't been raised in Caché forums or blogs too often. Perhaps, it happened because the notion of reflection is not explicitly defined in Caché. However, it exists in Caché and can be a very useful development tool.

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Discussion
· Mar 3, 2016
Anyone using Visual Studio Code?

Is anyone in the fine community of developers who work with ISC technologies looking at Microsoft's Visual Studio Code offering?

One of Bill McCormick's recent posts about Atelier referred to Visual Studio being considered the best IDE. Granted, Code is far less of a tool than VS, and probably always will be. But it claims to be open source and cross-platform, i.e. Linux and OS X as well as Windows.

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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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Earlier in this series, we've presented four different demo applications for iKnow, illustrating how its unique bottom-up approach allows users to explore the concepts and context of their unstructured data and then leverage these insights to implement real-world use cases. We started small and simple with core exploration through the Knowledge Portal, then organized our records according to content with the Set Analysis Demo, organized our domain knowledge using the Dictionary Builder Demo and finally build complex rules to extract nontrivial patterns from text with the Rules Builder Demo.

This time, we'll dive into a different area of the iKnow feature set: iFind. Where iKnow's core APIs are all about exploration and leveraging those results programmatically in applications and analytics, iFind is focused specifically on search scenarios in a pure SQL context. We'll be presenting a simple search portal implemented in Zen that showcases iFind's main features.

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