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Hi Everyone!

The Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services is currently developing an InterSystems ObjectScript Specialist certification exam, and we are reaching out to our community for feedback that will help us evaluate and establish the contents of this exam.

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When working with InterSystems IRIS, database developers and architects often face a critical decision: whether to use Dynamic SQL or Embedded SQL for querying and updating data. Both methods have their unique strengths and use cases, but understanding their performance implications is essential to making the right choice. Response time, a key metric in evaluating application performance, can vary significantly depending on the SQL approach used. Dynamic SQL offers flexibility, as queries can be constructed and executed at runtime, making it ideal for scenarios with unpredictable or highly variable query needs. Conversely, Embedded SQL emphasizes stability and efficiency by integrating SQL code directly into application logic, offering optimized response times for predefined query patterns.

In this article, I will explore the response times when using these two types of SQL and how they depend on different class structures and usage of parameters. So to do this, I'm going to use the following classes from the diagram:

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InterSystems ObjectScript extension for VS Code, version 3.0.1

Am also asking this question on the extension's GitHub page: Request textDocument/documentSymbol failed. Error: name must not be falsy · intersystems-community/vscode-objectscript · Discussion #1530 - but suspect more eyes will see it here, which might help gather additional information.

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Having been inspired with Shared code execution speed question/discussion, I dare to ask another one which is annoying me and my colleagues for several weeks.

We have a routine called Lib that comprises 200 $$-functions of 1500 code lines total. It was noticed that after calling _any_ function of another rather big routine (1900 functions, 32000 lines) the next call of $$someFunction^Lib(x) is getting 10-20% slower than previous call of the same function. This effect doesn't depend on:

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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 folks! Having recently onboarded to InterSystems, I realized that despite having a totally free and awesome Community Edition, it's not super clear how to get it. I decided to write up a guide highlighting all the different ways you can access the Community Edition of InterSystems IRIS:

Get InterSystems IRIS Community Edition as a Container

Working with a containerized instance of the Community Edition is the recommended approach for folks who are new to developing on InterSystems IRIS, and in my opinion it's the most straightforward. InterSystems IRIS Community Edition can be found on DockerHub; if you have an InterSystems SSO account, you can also find it in the InterSystems Container Registry.

In either case, you'll want to pull the image you want using the docker CLI:

docker pull intersystems/iris-community:latest-em
// or
docker pull containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

Next, you'll need to start the container: In order to interact with IRIS from outside the container (for example, to use the management portal) you'll need to publish some ports. The following command will run the IRIS Community Edition container with the superserver and web server ports published; note that you can't have anything else running that depends on ports 1972 or 52773!

docker run --name iris -d --publish 1972:1972 --publish 52773:52773 intersystems/iris-community:latest-em

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CCR users can now take advantage of an enhanced syntax for substituting pre-defined tokens with live URL links within phase-related text fields. In addition to the existing <env> token which automatically updates to reflect the Environment of the relevant CCR Record, CCR now introduces three new keywords: <smp> , <smpPrefix> , and <homepage>.

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High-Performance Message Searching in Health Connect

The Problem

Have you ever tried to do a search in Message Viewer on a busy interface and had the query time out? This can become quite a problem as the amount of data increases. For context, the instance of Health Connect I am working with does roughly 155 million Message Headers per day with 21 day message retention. To try and help with search performance, we extended the built-in SearchTable with commonly used fields in hopes that indexing these fields would result in faster query times. Despite this, we still couldn't get some of these queries to finish at all.

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Hi Community,

Watch this short exercise in writing basic code snippets in InterSystems ObjectScript using Copilot in VSCode and the GPT-4.0 engine. This screencast covers "Hello, World," global manipulation, class creation, and building a simple REST API application.

>> Coding InterSystems ObjectScript with Copilot <<

🗣 Presenter: @Evgeny Shvarov, Senior Manager of Developer and Startup Programs, InterSystems

📌 The related code can be found here: objectscript-copilot-demo.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/CanxHvMZyLY
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

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Article
· Feb 5, 2025 8m read
Using DocDB in SQL, almost

From the previous article, we identified some issues when working with JSON in SQL.

IRIS offers a dedicated feature for handling JSON documents, called DocDB.

InterSystems IRIS® data platform DocDB is a facility for storing and retrieving database data. It is compatible with, but separate from, traditional SQL table and field (class and property) data storage and retrieval. It is based on JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) which provides support for web-based data exchange. InterSystems IRIS provides support for developing DocDB databases and applications in REST and in ObjectScript, as well as providing SQL support for creating or querying DocDB data.

By its nature, InterSystems IRIS Document Database is a schema-less data structure. That means that each document has its own structure, which may differ from other documents in the same database. This has several benefits when compared with SQL, which requires a pre-defined data structure.

The word “document” is used here as a specific industry-wide technical term, as a dynamic data storage structure. “Document”, as used in DocDB, should not be confused with a text document, or with documentation.

Let's explore how DocDB can help store JSON in the database and integrate it into projects that rely solely on xDBC protocols.

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Migrating from Oracle, MSSQL, or other purely relational database systems to a multimodel InterSystems IRIS is a strategic decision that requires careful planning and execution. While this transition offers significant benefits, including enhanced performance, scalability, and support for modern architectures, it also comes with challenges. In this article I will highlight some of the considerations connected to coding to ensure a successful migration. I will leave everything connected to an actual migration of structures and data outside the scope of this article.


First, when you're considering migrating to a different database system, you need to understand your business logic, whether it's on the side of the application (application server) or the database server. Basically, where do you have your SQL statements that you will need to potentially rewrite?

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Hi developers!

This will be a very short article as in April 2025 with Lovable and other Prompt-to-UI tools it becomes possible to build the frontend with prompting. Even to the folks like me who is not familiar with modern UI techics at all.

Well, I know at least the words javascript, typescript and ReactJS, so in this very short article we will be building the ReactJS UI to InterSystems FHIR server with Lovable.ai.

Let's go!

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Hi noble devs!

Just building a simple frontend->JSON->IRIS backend story, and figured that IRIS while importing via %JSON.Adaptor wants JSON fields to match property names, meaning even should match the case. Like:

{ name: "John", 

surname: "Doe"}

will have issues while saving the dynamic object to a class Sample.Person with:

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The task is to find all globals that are referenced in certain routines. I could search for ^ using class(%Studio.Project).FindInFiles but that would also find ^ in comments and function calls. I can distinguish between a global and a function call visually, but it would be lovely to be able to skip function calls programmatically. Is it possible?

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Discussion
· Dec 16, 2025
Code Golf: Binary encoding!

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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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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Article
· Oct 22, 2025 2m read
Tips on handling Large data

Hello community,

I wanted to share my experience about working on Large Data projects. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to handle massive patient data, payor data and transactional logs while working in an hospital industry. I have had the chance to build huge reports which had to be written using advanced logics fetching data across multiple tables whose indexing was not helping me write efficient code.

Here is what I have learned about managing large data efficiently.

Choosing the right data access method.

As we all here in the community are aware of, IRIS provides multiple ways to access data. Choosing the right method, depends on the requirement.

  • Direct Global Access: Fastest for bulk read/write operations. For example, if i have to traverse through indexes and fetch patient data, I can loop through the globals to process millions of records. This will save a lot of time.
Set ToDate=+H
Set FromDate=+$H-1 For  Set FromDate=$O(^PatientD("Date",FromDate)) Quit:FromDate>ToDate  Do
. Set PatId="" For  Set PatId=$Order(^PatientD("Date",FromDate,PatID)) Quit:PatId=""  Do
. . Write $Get(^PatientD("Date",FromDate,PatID)),!
  • Using SQL: Useful for reporting or analytical requirements, though slower for huge data sets.

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We recently changed the 'UserID" property in a "User" class from type of %String to be %Library.Username. This is for better consistency across our codebase regarding MAXLEN limit.

%Library.Username is a system wrapper datatype which extends %String and has a MAXLEN of 160. This change should have minimal/no impact on code behavior. However, we found that some SQL query cannot return expected rows after the change. Query will return empty values even if the entry is in the table.

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When using standard SQL or the object layer in InterSystems IRIS, metadata consistency is usually maintained through built-in validation and type enforcement. However, legacy systems that bypass these layers—directly accessing globals—can introduce subtle and serious inconsistencies.

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