#InterSystems IRIS

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InterSystems IRIS is a Complete Data Platform
InterSystems IRIS gives you everything you need to capture, share, understand, and act upon your organization’s most valuable asset – your data.
As a complete platform, InterSystems IRIS eliminates the need to integrate multiple development technologies. Applications require less code, fewer system resources, and less maintenance.


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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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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Updated 12/09/25

Hi Community,

You can unlock the full potential of InterSystems IRIS—and help your team onboard—with the full range of InterSystems learning resources offered online and in person, for every role in your organization. Developers, system administrators, data analysts, and integrators can quickly get up to speed.

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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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Introduction

As AI-driven automation becomes an essential part of modern information systems, integrating AI capabilities into existing platforms should be seamless and efficient. The IRIS Agent project showcases how generative AI can work effortlessly with InterSystems IRIS, leveraging its powerful interoperability framework—without the need to learn Python or build separate AI workflows from scratch.

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What are best practices for JSON transformation in IRIS interoperability? This is for a non-healthcare use case, so any tools we happen to have around FHIR might not be available. The motivating use case is trimming down a verbose and needlessly complex REST API response to feed to an LLM - trying to reduce token usage and maybe get better results from less noisy data.

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The previous article introduced IrisOASTestGen, a tool designed to generate REST API test code for InterSystems IRIS based on OpenAPI 2.0 specifications. It demonstrated how to scaffold test cases using the default templates bundled with OpenAPI Generator.

This follow-up focuses on the next natural step: customizing the generated test code.
By extending the code generation logic with Mustache templates, it becomes possible to express richer semantics, implement CRUD-aware tests, and create more meaningful test suites.

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Hello!
I have the following XML document obtained through a string:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<MainDocument xmlns="urn:hl7-org:v3">
<realmCode code="IT"/>
<title>kjbkjkjbkjb</title>
<effectiveTime value="20090905150716"/>
[.....other tags.....]
<versionNumber value="1"/>
<component>
<body>mhvjhjkvhj</body>
<component>
<section>content</section>
<ID>5</ID>

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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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One of the newest features of .Net core 10 with C# 14 is the file-based apps. This feature allows you to execute C# code in a simple .cs file without the need to create a solution, a project, or any of the related structure.

For example you can create a script.cs file using the notepad with the content: 

Console.WriteLine(“This is a script in c#.”);

Then in the command line or the terminal you execute the command:

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Contestant

FastJsonSchema: High-Performance JSON Validation in IRIS

Validating JSON data against JSON Schema is a common requirement for modern applications. FastJsonSchema brings this capability natively to InterSystems IRIS, combining speed, simplicity, and full schema compliance.

Unlike traditional validation approaches, FastJsonSchema generates native ObjectScript code from your JSON Schemas and compiles it directly to iris object code, enabling idiomatic performance without relying on external libraries or runtimes.

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Hello Developers! 👋
I’m excited to introduce IRIS IO Utility, my submission for the InterSystems "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025. This VS Code extension provides you an intuitive and powerful interface for importing and exporting data without leaving your IDE.

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In some cases, it's necessary to manipulate data from one namespace to another. For example, a routine in the "N1" namespace needs data from the "N2" namespace. In legacy systems (using only globals), it's common to make the global universal, but what about persistent classes? Is this type of globalization also possible?

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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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Hey Community!

We're happy to share a new video from our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Smarter Table Statistics @ Ready 2025

https://www.youtube.com/embed/k7cOSuydwHI
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<--break->

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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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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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There are a select few in the group that have been using Github as a Local Client push to a Repository setup in GitHub. Questions were brought up today about the security, and possible issues when it comes to data being pushed in this method.

Looking over code we have noticed that there is Histogram data within some of the class files that could be considered a security issue. Does anyone else have concerns with the Histogram data being within the class files pushed up to github?

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There's a pattern I've encountered several times where I need to use a temp file/folder and have it cleaned up at some point later.

The natural thing to do here is to follow the patterns from "Robust Error Handling and Cleanup in ObjectScript" with a try/catch/pseudo-finally or a registered object to manage cleanup in the destructor. %Stream.File* also has a "RemoveOnClose" property that you can set - but use with care, as you could accidentally remove an important file, and this flag gets reset by calls to %Save() so you'll need to set it back to 1 after doing that.

There's one tricky case, though - suppose you need the temp file to survive in an enclosing stack level. e.g.:

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Hi,

We're working on new capabilities to help you build Agents and AI applications faster with InterSystems IRIS. In order to better understand which entry points and development methodologies would help you most, we've created this brief survey: Building AI solutions with InterSystems IRIS.

Filling it in should not take much more than 5 minutes, and your feedback on this exciting topic will help us fine tune our designs and prioritize the right features.

Thanks in advance!
benjamin

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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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