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Hello IRIS community,

InterSystems Certification is currently developing a certification exam for InterSystems IRIS SQL professionals, and if you match the exam candidate description given below, we would like you to beta test the exam! The exam will be available for beta testing starting May 19, 2025.

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Over the past couple of months, I have been working on the SMART on FHIR EHR Launch to test the capabilities of IRIS for Health using two open-source apps from CSIRO: SMART-EHR-Launcher and SMART Forms App. This journey has been incredibly interesting, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to work on this task and explore more of IRIS for Health’s potential.

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REST API with Swagger in InterSystems IRIS

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.

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Article
· Jul 10, 2025 16m read
The Zen Angle

Dear community, I have a confession to make. I have not gotten over Zen yet. Alas, all good things must come to an EOF, so I am currently learning about Angular. I am working on proving to myself that with the right back end and Angular components, I can deliver to myself and my team a very Zen-like experience in this environment.

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Over the years, I’ve noticed that certain SQL questions come up repeatedly on the InterSystems Developer Community, especially about using the LIKE predicate in different contexts. Common variations include:

and many more derivatives. So, I decided to write an article that focuses on how LIKE works in InterSystems IRIS SQL, especially when used with variables in Embedded SQL, Dynamic SQL, and Class Queries, while touching on pattern escaping and special character searches.

First of all, I'd like to mention that InterSystems IRIS SQL offers most of the capabilities available in other relational DBMS that implement a later version of the SQL standard. But at the same time, it's important to mention that apart from relational access, in IRIS you can also use other models to get the same data, for example, object or document models.

On this note, let's look at the LIKE predicate and how this tool is used in SQL for pattern matching.

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Every thriving community relies on members whose quiet dedication and deep expertise keep it growing stronger year after year. In the InterSystems Developer Community, one such pillar is @Megumi Kakechi, a long-time engineer and support specialist whose 17 years with InterSystems and 9 years on the Developer Community reflect a true passion for helping others learn, solve problems, and innovate.

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

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Article
· Mar 10, 2025 5m read
FHIR SQL Builder: step by step

The FHIR standard establishes a powerful but flexible data model that can smoothly adapt to the complexities of operational healthcare data management. This flexibility comes at the cost of a data model with many tables and relationships, even for simple data such as the patient's record of telephone numbers, addresses, and emails. It would easily require querying 4 different tables. However, FHIR SQL Builder eliminates this problem, allowing you to create visual projections (mappings) in web wizards.

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An extension “extends” or enhances a FHIR resource or a data element in a custom way. The extension can be added to the root of a resource, such as “Patient.ethnicity” in US Core profile, and they can be added to individual elements such as HumanName, Address or Identifier.

Did you know that you can also add an extension to a primitive data type?

Primitives usually store a single item and are the most basic element in FHIR. For example: "Keren", false, 1234, 12/08/2024 etc.

For example, the patient resources might look like this:

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As we all know, InterSystems is a great company.

Their products can be just as useful as they are complex.

Yet, our pride sometimes prevents us from admitting that we might not understand some concepts or products that InterSystems offers for us.

Today we are beginning a series of articles explaining how some of the intricate InterSystems products work, obviously simply and clearly.

In this essay, I will clarify what Machine Learning is and how to take advantage of it.... because this time, you WILL KNOW for sure what I am talking about.

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Article
· Apr 1, 2025 1m read
How to get server/instance info

Hi all,

As part of the development an API to know what is the instance of IRIS is connected, I've found some methods to know information about the server that can help you.

Get the server name: $SYSTEM.INetInfo.LocalHostName()

Get the server IP: $SYSTEM.INetInfo.HostNameToAddr($SYSTEM.INetInfo.LocalHostName())

Get the instance name: $PIECE($SYSTEM,":",2)

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Article
· Feb 26, 2025 6m read
The Case for IRIS and JavaScript

Introduction

My guess is that most IRIS developers create their applications using its native ObjectScript language or, if using an external language, then most likely using either Java, Python or perhaps C++.

I suspect that only a minority have considered using JavaScript as their language of choice, which, if true, is a great shame, because, In my opinion and experience, JavaScript is the closest equivalent to ObjectScript in terms of its ability to integrate with the IRIS's underlying multi-dimensional database.

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The "Ask Developer Community AI" tool is an excellent resource for studying for the certification. I asked it about each topic that will be covered in the test and the results are below.
Note: I classified each answer by the assertiveness that I consider as good, average and bad.

Note 2: The article has 4 parts, each one for an exam area.

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Hi Community,

Please welcome @Henry Pereira as our new Moderator in the Developer Community Team! 🎉

As an active member, Henry has consistently shared valuable insights, supported fellow developers, and driven meaningful discussions across the Community. His deep expertise and collaborative spirit make him a perfect fit to help guide and grow our Developer Community.

Let's greet Henry with a round of applause and look at his bio!

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Introduction

Database performance has become a critical success factor in a modern application environment. Therefore identifying and optimizing the most resource-intensive SQL queries is essential for guaranteeing a smooth user experience and maintaining application stability.

This article will explore a quick approach to analyzing SQL query execution statistics on an InterSystems IRIS instance to identify areas for optimization within a macro-application.

Rather than focusing on real-time monitoring, we will set up a system that collects and analyzes statistics pre-calculated by IRIS once an hour. This approach, while not enabling instantaneous monitoring, offers an excellent compromise between the wealth of data available and the simplicity of implementation.

We will use Grafana for data visualization and analysis, InfluxDB for time series storage, and Telegraf for metrics collection. These tools, recognized for their power and flexibility, will allow us to obtain a clear and exploitable view.

More specifically, we will detail the configuration of Telegraf to retrieve statistics. We will also set up the integration with InfluxDB for data storage and analysis, and create customized dashboards in Grafana. This will help us quickly identify queries requiring special attention.

To facilitate the orchestration and deployment of these various components, we will employ Docker.

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Hello everybody,

I would like to export project contents using Visual Studio Code, as well as I do with InterSystems Studio.

However, while attempting the export through the InterSystems extension I get the following error:

- There are no folders in the current workspace that code can be exported to.

These are the step to reproduce my error:

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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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It's been a while since the new UI for Productions and DTL was published as a preview and I would like to know your opinions about it.

WARNING: This is a personal opinion, totally personal and not related with InterSystems Corporation.

I'm going to start with the Interoperabilty screen:

Production screen:

The style is sober and without frills, following the line of cloud services design, I like it.

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