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Hi Community,

On December 7, 2025, the InterSystems Developer Community officially celebrated its 10th anniversary! 🥳🎉

And now we honor this decade of learning, collaboration, problem-solving, and advancing InterSystems technologies. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or joined recently, thank you for your contributions, questions, ideas, and support. This milestone belongs to all of you 💖 You’ve built this community into what it is today, and we’re truly grateful!

As part of the celebration, we invited you to participate in a special anniversary video. And boy, you delivered! Thank you to everyone who took the time to share their greetings, memories, and kind words.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/oYjP3a3u8Io
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As part of our 10-year celebration, we are pleased to recognize certain members whose long-standing contributions have significantly shaped the InterSystems Developer Community.

Over the past decade, these individuals have shared knowledge, supported peers, and helped strengthen the collaborative spirit that defines our Community.

To honor their impact, we are introducing a special set of 10th Anniversary Edition awards and Global Masters badges:

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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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Apache Airflow is the leading open-source platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines and workflows using Python. Workflows are defined as code (DAGs), making them version-controlled, testable, and reusable. With a rich UI, 100+ built-in operators, dynamic task generation, and native support for cloud providers, Airflow powers ETL/ELT, ML pipelines, and batch jobs at companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Spotify.

Airflow Application Layout

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In this article, we will discuss all the debugging tools included in the Microsoft Visual Studio Code IDE.

What will be covered:

  • Breakpoints
  • Watch window
  • Call Stack

Let's start by learning about debugging requirements!

Prerequisites

There are two plugins (extensions) for debugging ObjectScript:

The first is part of the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack. The second is Serenji, a standalone plugin that provides an editor, file manager, and debugging functionality. Both plugins can be installed from the plugin store. To activate key functionality, Serenji requires a license. For this article, we'll use the InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack to reduce the learning curve. After you've mastered the basics, you can consider purchasing a paid license for Serenji.

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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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As part of our 10th anniversary celebration, we invite you to take part in a discussion reflecting on your experience with the InterSystems Developer Community.

Over the past decade, thousands of members have shaped this space through knowledge sharing, collaboration, and meaningful connections — and your voice is an integral part of that history.

We encourage you to join the conversation and share your story. In the comments, please tell us:

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Modern SQL engines are enormously complex pieces of software. Even when they appear stable and mature, subtle bugs can hide in their optimizers, type systems, predicate evaluation, or execution layers. These bugs rarely announce themselves loudly. Instead, they quietly produce incorrect results, behave inconsistently, or fail abruptly under specific combinations of SQL constructs.

This is precisely why tools like SQLancer exist. SQLancer automatically generates SQL queries and uses logical “oracles” to detect when a database behaves incorrectly. It has revealed hundreds of real bugs in widely used systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB.

With this in mind, I attempted to bring SQLancer to InterSystems IRIS, starting with the NOREC oracle — a powerful method for detecting optimizer correctness issues. The journey, however, uncovered not just potential SQL correctness problems, but also a surprising number of driver-level and server-level failures that prevented SQLancer from running at full strength.

This article summarizes why SQLancer is important, how the NOREC oracle works, and what unexpected findings appeared while testing IRIS.

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Article
· Dec 3 28m read
Security in IRIS

Security is fundamental to enterprise application development. InterSystems IRIS provides a comprehensive security framework that protects data, controls access, and ensures compliance. This guide introduces essential security features for developers new to IRIS, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and practical implementation strategies.

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Dear Community,

As the 🎄 Festive Season 🎄 approaches, we’re excited to send our warmest wishes your way. May your holidays be filled with the joy of 🧑‍💻 learning, 🫂 connecting with fellow developers, and the thrill of new ideas and challenges waiting in the year ahead!

Looking back on 2025, we’re delighted to celebrate another year of remarkable achievements together with YOU, our incredible members:

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The Power of Indexing in Database Tables

When working with databases, most developers understand the concept of an index and why it's used: to speed up data retrieval. But the real impact of indexing often becomes clear only when you compare scenarios with and without it.

Do you Know what Happens Without an Index?
Imagine a table with three columns: Name, Age, and MobileNumber.

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Article
· Dec 4 6m read
Sub-Table Security

InterSystems IRIS provides extensive configurable security options, yet many developers primarily use roles and resources to secure entire tables or routines. Today, we will delve deeper. We can also secure individual columns and rows separately, but these two mechanisms operate very differently. Let's begin with the columns.

Column Security

For testing and demonstration, we will keep our table structure concise and straightforward. We have a table called "Person" in the USER namespace that contains an ID column, a date of birth column (DOB), first name, and last name.

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In the previous article, we talked about ODBC and connecting from C#. And now, let's look at JDBC and Java. The InterSystems JDBC driver is the recommended, high-performance way to integrate your Java applications.

Here is a step-by-step guide to getting your Java application connected to an IRIS instance using the JDBC driver.

Step 1: Obtain and Include the InterSystems IRIS JDBC Driver

Unlike ODBC drivers, which are often installed system-wide, JDBC drivers are typically distributed as JAR files that must be included in your Java project's classpath.

If InterSystems IRIS is installed on your local machine or another you have access to, you can find the file in install-dir/dev/java/lib/ or similar, where install-dir is the installation directory for the instance. Conversely, you can download the jar file from Driver packages page.

Or as suggested by @Dmitry Maslennikov in the comments, use the maven central repository for Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.intersystems</groupId>
    <artifactId>intersystems-jdbc</artifactId>
    <version>3.10.5</version>
</dependency>

or for Gradle:

implementation("com.intersystems:intersystems-jdbc:3.10.5")

Include the jar file in Project:

  • Maven/Gradle: If you use a build tool, the simplest method is to add the InterSystems JDBC driver as a dependency in your pom.xml or build.gradle file. This automatically downloads and manages the JAR.
  • Manual: For simple projects, you must place the JAR file in a project directory (e.g., /lib) and explicitly add it to your classpath when compiling and running.

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Hi Community!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the "Improving the Initial Developer Experience" sweepstakes! Your feedback is invaluable in making InterSystems products better, and we will use your ideas to improve our offerings. Now, it's time to announce the winner - watch the video to see the sweepstake drawing:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/d2ye_mnBxZo
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Project Overview / Introduction

Developing and testing REST APIs in InterSystems IRIS often requires a significant amount of boilerplate code. While ObjectScript provides powerful tools for building APIs, writing consistent and repeatable tests can be time‑consuming. This is where IrisOASTestGen comes in.

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We are a group of interface analysts in a healthcare setting, running IRIS for Health 2024, having upgraded over time from an old ENSEMBLE environment. We have been working on a wish list of development goals, but are having trouble finding the correct, best practice method/path for getting to what we envision.

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Hi noble developers!

Have a question/discussion. Sometimes, while developing, we'd need to connect VSCode directly to a remote server (e.g., stage one) for debugging purposes. And after change back to local one. And then to remote again.

How do you perform this switching in VSCode in a convenient way?

I have several settings.json files (settings_local, settings_remote) which I put to a main settings.json when I need to make VSCode to connect to switch the connection:

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In this final part of our introduction to Window Functions, we will explore the remaining functions that have not been covered yet. You will also discover performance tips and a practical guide to help you decide when (and when not) to use window functions effectively.

1. Offset and Positional Value Functions

Overview

These functions reference values are calculated from other rows relative to the current row, or they are extracted from the first, last, or nth values within a window.

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Hello Community,

✨ As we wrap up another incredible year on the Developer Community, it’s time to look back at everything you accomplished in 2025! Your personal 2025 Recap is now live — a tailored snapshot of your activity, milestones, and the value you brought to the community this year.

From the articles you shared to the discussions you sparked, your contributions helped shape the knowledge and collaboration on our platform. Now you can revisit all of it in one place!

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I'm pleased to announce the publication of gj :: dataLoader, a new VS Code extension that simplifies the task of loading data from local CSV files into SQL tables on your InterSystems IRIS servers.

Here's an introductory video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XohVoW5rSy4
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Question
· Dec 21
XDBC memory leaks

I have a business service that actively reads data from a remote Postgres database. OnProcessInput opens a XDBC (actually JDBC) connection, executes an SQL query, fetches several thousand rows, iterates the resultset, and closes the connection. On each iteration I also need to update each source row in the remote database using PreparedStatement.

In other words, in every OnProcessInput call I have a long running SELECT statement and several thousands small UPDATE statements.

The problems I'm facing are:

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