#InterSystems IRIS

Hey Community,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ Advancing Healthcare Interoperability - Strategy and Vision @ Ready 2025

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1mBIv-lGco
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I have a new project to store information from REST responses into an IRIS database. I’ll need to sync information from at least two dozen separate REST endpoints, which means creating nearly that many ObjectScript classes to store the results from those endpoints.

I have see this discussed on the community but I'm not quite finding an answer.

Motivation

I didn't know about ObjectScript until I started my new job. Objectscript isn't actually a young programming language. Compared to C++, Java and Python, the community isn't as active, but we're keen to make this place more vibrant, aren't we?

I've noticed that some of my colleagues are finding it tricky to get their heads around the class relationships in these huge projects. There aren't any easy-to-use modern class diagram tool for ObjectScript.

Related Work

I have tried relavant works:

Developing Custom Components for Integrations – In Person (Boston, MA) February 10-12, 2026

I was trying to see if we could connect to another Server, we use to execute external scripts using %Net.SSH.Session.

Hi Developers!

Sometimes we need to deal with classes/tables where the primary key and the IdKey are something that is maintained by yourself.

What is the proper way to generate a new ID in case where ID is a %BigInt?

Property id As %Library.BigInt

Are there any system methods to provide it?

There is data already imported via SQL, so there is no last ID stored in ^myclassD, so I cannot do $I(^myclassD).

Thinking of:

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

Hi everyone,

I am currently setting up InterSystems API Manager (IAM) 3.4.3.11 using Docker. The installation is successful, the license is active, and I can access the Manager (port 8002).

I am now trying to secure the Administration Portal using basic-auth. I've found some documentation stating that I should:

If you want to generate JWT from x509 cert/key, any operation (including reading) on %SYS.X509Credentials requires U on %Admin_Secure resource.%Admin_Secure is required because %SYS.X509Credentials is persistent, and it's implemented th

Current setup:

• 2x IRIS instances in mirror pair
• 1x IRIS development server (non-mirror)

Right now we have a script that successfully replaces the database for our IRIS development server with the latest snapshot from IRIS production, this process takes under 1 minute.

Table of Contents

1. Purpose of the article
2. What containers are and why they make sense with IRIS
    2.1 Containers and images in a nutshell
    2.2 Why containers are useful for developers
    2.3 Why IRIS works well with Docker
3. Prerequisites
4. Installing the InterSystems IRIS image
    4.1 Using Docker Hub
    4.2 Pulling the image
5. Running the InterSystems IRIS image
    5.1 Starting an IRIS container
    5.2 Checking container status
    5.3 Executing code in the container terminal
    5.4 Accessing the IRIS Management Portal
    5.5 Connecting the container to VS Code
    5.6 Stopping or removing the container
    5.7 Setting a specific password with a bind mount
    5.8 Using durable %SYS volumes
     5.8.1 What gets stored with durable %SYS
     5.8.2 How to enable durable %SYS
6. Using Docker Compose
    6.1 Docker Compose example
    6.2 Running Docker Compose
7. Using a Dockerfile to run custom source code
    7.1 Dockerfile example
    7.2 Docker Compose example
    7.3 Understanding layers, image tagging and build vs. run time
    7.4 Source code and init script
    7.5 Building the image with Dockerfile
    7.6 Running instructions in the containerized IRIS terminal
8. Conclusion and what’s next

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

The demo is based on the raw class descriptions.
The data classes used are Address, Person, Employee, Company
For a more attractive demo, a JSONtoString method by ID was added.