Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab WorkFlow
• GitLab CI/CD
• CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

In this article I'll cover testing and debugging Caché web applications (mainly REST) with external tools. Second part covers Caché tools.

You wrote server-side code and want to test it from a client or already have a web application and it doesn't work. Here comes debugging. In this article I'll go from the easiest to use tools (browser) to the most comprehensive (packet analyzer), but first let's talk a little about most common errors and how they can be resolved.

While the integrity of Caché and InterSystems IRIS databases is completely protected from the consequences of system failure, physical storage devices do fail in ways that corrupt the data they store. For that reason, many sites choose to run regular database integrity checks, particularly in coordination with backups to validate that a given backup could be relied upon in a disaster.

Index to Articles

Hi All

I am an avid user of ZEN for over 10 years now and it works for me.
But it seems that Intersystems are no longer actively developing it (or ZEN Mojo), the only published reference to this is here

Index

This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added.

You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting.

• Part 1 - Getting started on the Journey, collecting metrics.
• Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected.
• Part 3 - Focus on CPU.
• Part 4 - Looking at memory.
• Part 5 - Monitoring with SNMP.
• Part 6 - Caché storage IO profile.
• Part 7 - ECP for performance, scalability and availability.
• Part 8 - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning
• Part 9 - Caché VMware Best Practice Guide
• Part 10 - VM Backups and IRIS freeze/thaw scripts
• Part 11 - Virtualizing large databases - VMware cpu capacity planning

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

Good men don’t need rules.

The Doctor.

It's not an easy task to be a master of dates and times, it is always a problem and sometimes confusing in any programming language, we are going to clarify and put a few tips to make this task as simple as possible.

Get on the TARDIS and I'm going to turn you into a Time lord

There are many ways to generate excel files using Intersystems, some of them are ZEN reports, IRIS reports ( Logi reports or formally known as JReports), or we can use third party Java libraries, the possibilities are almost endless.

But, what if you want to create a simple spreadsheet with only Caché ObjectScript? (no third party applications)

Attention:

This is a coding example working on Caché 2018.1.3
It will not be kept in sync with new versions 
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !

Full backport from IRIS for Windows (x86-64) 2020.1 (Build 215U) Mon Mar 30 2020 20:14:33 EDT

IRIS brought us an excellent %JSON.Package
It is an essential component of the Project Manager (ZPM)
This backport makes it available also in Caché and builds a base to eventually backport also ZPM.

++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster.

Enterprises need to grow and manage their global computing infrastructures rapidly and efficiently while simultaneously optimizing and managing capital costs and expenses. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing and storage services meet the needs of the most demanding Caché based application by providing
 a highly robust global computing infrastructure.

I ran into an interesting ObjectScript use case today with a general solution that I wanted to share.

Use case:

I have a JSON array (specifically, in my case, an array of issues from Jira) that I want to aggregate over a few fields - say, category, priority, and issue type. I then want to flatten the aggregates into a simple list with the total for each of the groups. Of course, for the aggregation, it makes sense to use a local array in the form:

agg(category, priority, type) = total

Such that for each record in the input array I can just:

InterSystems Caché globals provide very convenient features for developers. But why are globals so fast and efficient?

Theory

Basically, the Caché database is a catalog having the same name as the database and containing the CACHE.DAT file. On Unix systems, the database can also be an ordinary disk partition.