Holiday Reading: What Lies Beneath!
For those of you who might be new to IRIS, and even those who have used Cache or IRIS for some time but want to explore beyond its usually-assumed boundaries and practices, you might want to dive into this detailed exploration of the database engine that is at its heart, and discover just what you can really do with it, going way beyond what InterSystems have done with it for you.
You'll discover that it's actually a hugely powerful yet incredibly simple storage engine that allows you to model any kind of database you wish, once you understand and master its simple, basic principles. Its storage model can be referred to as "Global Storage" which, it turns out, can be modelled on top of any hierarchical data storage engine, and even on the Redis NoSQL database. However, the "native" implementations, eg in IRIS and Cache, are the fastest by a significant margin, outpacing what the database world normally recognise as the planet's fastest databases (eg LMDB).
Global Storage is (sadly) one of the best kept secrets of the database world, but I've distilled into this set of articles all my 40-odd years of knowledge and experience of using and pushing this database technology to its limits. It's my attempt to try to make it all at least a little bit less secret and open your eyes to what really lies beneath!
So strap yourself in and read all about it here: