Question
· Mar 25, 2022

Overview of Business Intelligence in IRIS (starting at the very beginning...)

Hi,

 

The company I work for has one software application that uses an IRIS database, with almost all the others using SQL databases.

 

On a SQL database, we can create local tables and create views. These are invaluable when it comes to reporting, and everyone here is quite up to speed with using SSMS to create functions, stored procedures, etc.

 

However, when it comes to IRIS, no-one seems to know anything. Up to this point, the only way we've done any BI on the IRIS data is by managing to link to it via SQL Server Business Intelligence Developer Studio (which wasn't simple) and then write reports against the standard tables (which are called classes I believe?).

 

Recently we have gotten Power BI and I see that I can connect to IRIS with this.

 

Is anyone able to give me an extremely simple overview of how to go about becoming a bit more savvy in terms of BI for IRIS? Can local / custom views / tables be created? If so, how? I presume I need some sort of Intersystems GUI to do this? Anything would be appreciated, but please note I have 0% Intersystems knowledge. The database looks to be incrediby powerful, and I'd like to harness this and really develop the data held inside it, especially in terms of creating local tables/views (or their equivalent for IRIS).

 

Many thanks in advance.

Discussion (5)3
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@Andrew Barber - welcome to the community!

The links above were from out HealthShare documentation which is protected, however the content is identical in our InterSystems IRIS documentation which anyone can access.  Here are the pages shared by @Stephen Canzano but from our open docs:

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=RSQL_createview

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=RSQL_createtable

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=RSQL_createfunction

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=RSQL_createquery

Basically, you can do everything in InterSystems IRIS that you can in traditional relational DBs but you get object-oriented access thrown in as well.  So classes and tables are two views on the same persistence.  I suggest the following primers to help you start getting your head wrapped around it:

https://community.intersystems.com/post/classes-tables-and-globals-how-i...

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls... (see the table comparing Object vs SQL concepts)

And a deeper dive into how it all works together:

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls...

(or from the OO lense: https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls...

Hope that helps get you started.  Keep asking questions - the Community is a great place to learn!