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· May 1

Best Practice for Existing ODBC Connection When System Becomes IRIS for HealthShare

#Ensemble #HealthShare #InterSystems IRIS #InterSystems IRIS for Health #TrakCare #Global Masters #Health Connect #Other

Mirror Member

Hi ISC Experts,

I'm in the process of setting up InterSystems IRIS for HealthShare with database mirroring, and I’d appreciate some guidance around how to handle an existing ODBC connection in this new setup.

Scenario:

  • We currently have a system running IRIS for HealthShare that external systems connect to via ODBC (using a standard connection string with hostname and port).
  • We're now configuring mirroring on this system — it will become one of the mirror members (Primary/Backup).
  • The external system using ODBC will not be part of the mirror, but it needs to continue accessing the IRIS instance seamlessly during failover.

Questions:

  1. How should the existing ODBC connection be modified (if at all) to work properly with mirroring?
    • Can ODBC be configured with a mirror-aware connection string?
    • Or should we set up a Virtual IP (VIP) for the mirror and point the ODBC client to that and how would I make this mirror aware?
  2. What are the best practices to ensure high availability for ODBC clients during mirror failover?
  3. Are there specific considerations for HealthShare environments, especially with regard to externally connected systems (via ODBC) that are not mirror-aware?

Any official guidance, sample configurations, or insight from similar deployments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Fraser

Product version: IRIS 2023.2
Discussion (2)2
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Enrico Parisi · May 1

Configure a VIP for the mirror using built in IRIS VIP configuration, or, if you cannot use built in VIP, you can use an external balancer (F5, HAProxy etc.) to handle/create the VIP "externally".

Then instead of using the IP/name of the mirror members you use the VIP address/name to connect to the active mirror member node. Use VIP for ODBC and any other connection to IRIS.

You did not specified what kind of HealthShare environment you have in place (UCR?), depending of your HealthShare setup a VIP is a prerequisite for configuring an HealthShare  federation.

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