We are ridiculously good at mastering data. The data is clean, multi-sourced, related and we only publish it with resulting levels of decay that guarantee the data is current. We chose the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM) to land the data, and enable exchange of the data through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®).

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InterSystems SAM is a great tool to monitor your InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS For Health clusters on prem or in a cloud environment. This article describes how you can implement a customized alert handler. This is currently an undocumented and most likely an unknown feature of InterSystems SAM. With future releases it will be probably made easier to leverage this useful concept.

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Like hardware hosts, virtual hosts in public and private clouds can develop resource bottlenecks as workloads increase. If you are using and managing InterSystems IRIS instances deployed in public or private clouds, you may have encountered a situation in which addressing performance or other issues requires increasing the capacity of an instance's host (that is, vertically scaling).

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cAdvisor (short for container Advisor) analyzes and exposes resource usage and performance data from running containers. cAdvisor exposes Prometheus metrics out of the box.

https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/cadvisor/

Prometheus is integrated in SAM. This makes it possible to leverage the cAdvisor metrics and expose them via Prometheus and Grafana.

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Article
· Mar 17, 2021 3m read
Making the most of $Query

I ran into an interesting ObjectScript use case today with a general solution that I wanted to share.

Use case:

I have a JSON array (specifically, in my case, an array of issues from Jira) that I want to aggregate over a few fields - say, category, priority, and issue type. I then want to flatten the aggregates into a simple list with the total for each of the groups. Of course, for the aggregation, it makes sense to use a local array in the form:

agg(category, priority, type) = total

Such that for each record in the input array I can just:

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Introduction

InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 includes PEX (Production EXtension Framework) to facilitate the development of IRIS Interoperability productions with components written in Java or .NET.

Thanks to PEX, an integration developer with knowledge of Java or .NET can benefit from the power, scalability, and robustness of the InterSystems IRIS Interoperability framework and be productive in no time.

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In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

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In this article, we will run an InterSystems IRIS cluster using docker and Merge CPF files - a new feature allowing you to configure servers with ease.

On UNIX® and Linux, you can modify the default iris.cpf using a declarative CPF merge file. A merge file is a partial CPF that sets the desired values for any number of parameters upon instance startup. The CPF merge operation works only once for each instance.

Our cluster architecture is very simple, it would consist of one Node1 (master node) and two Data Nodes (check all available roles). Unfortunately, docker-compose cannot deploy to several servers (although it can deploy to remote hosts), so this is useful for local development of sharding-aware data models, tests, and such. For a productive InterSystems IRIS Cluster deployment, you should use either ICM or IKO.

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While the integrity of Caché and InterSystems IRIS databases is completely protected from the consequences of system failure, physical storage devices do fail in ways that corrupt the data they store. For that reason, many sites choose to run regular database integrity checks, particularly in coordination with backups to validate that a given backup could be relied upon in a disaster.

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Updated Jan 19th, 2023.

Hi all,

I want to share a quick little method you can use to enable ssl with a self signed certificate on your local development instance of IRIS/HealthShare. This enables you to test https-specific features such as OAuth without a huge lift.

1. Install OpenSSL

Windows     : Download from https://www.openssl.org or other built OpenSSL Binary. 

Debian Linux: $ sudo apt-get -y install openssl

RHEL        : $ sudo yum install openssl
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In this article, I will show how you can easily containerize .Net/Java Gateways.

For our example, we will develop an Integration with Apache Kafka.

And to interoperate with Java/.Net code we will use PEX .

Architecture

Our solution will run completely in docker and look like this:

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Article
· Jul 8, 2020 7m read
Tips for debugging with %Status

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

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Hi Developers!

Suppose you have a persistent class with data and you want to have a simple Angular UI for it to view the data and make CRUD operations.

Recently @Alberto Fuentes described how to build Angular UI for your InterSystems IRIS application using RESTForms2.

In this article, I want to tell you how you can get a simple Angular UI to CRUD and view your InterSystems IRIS class data automatically in less than 5 minutes.

Let's go!

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Article
· Jun 19, 2020 5m read
Migrate from Java Business Host to PEX

Migrate from Java Business Host to PEX

With the release PEX in InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2020.1, customers have a better way to build Java into productions than the Java Business Host. PEX provides a complete set of APIs for building interoperability components and is available in both Java and .NET. The Java Business Host has been deprecated and will be retired in a future release.

Advantages of PEX

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Over the past year or so, my team (Application Services at InterSystems - tasked with building and maintaining many of our internal applications, and providing tools and best practices for other departmental applications) has embarked on a journey toward building Angular/REST-based user interfaces to existing applications originally built using CSP and/or Zen. This has presented an interesting challenge that may be familiar to many of you - building out new REST APIs to existing data models and business logic.

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While reviewing our documentation for our ^pButtons (in IRIS renamed as ^SystemPerformance) performance monitoring utility, a customer told me: "I understand all of this, but I wish it could be simpler… easier to define profiles, manage them etc.".

After this session I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and provide some easier human interface for this.

The first step in this was to wrap a class-based API to the existing pButtons routine.

I was also able to add some more "features" like showing what profiles are currently running, their time remaining to run, previously running processes and more.

The next step was to add on top of this API, a REST API class.

With this artifact (a pButtons REST API) in hand, one can go ahead and build a modern UI on top of that.

For example -

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This article is a continuation of Deploying InterSystems IRIS solution on GKE Using GitHub Actions, in which, with the help of GitHub Actions pipeline, our zpm-registry was deployed in a Google Kubernetes cluster created by Terraform. In order not to repeat, we’ll take as a starting point that:

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This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

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Hi colleagues!

Every day Johns Hopkins University publishes new data on coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic status.

I built a simple InterSystems IRIS Analytics dashboard using InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in docker deployed on GCP Kubernetes which shows key measures of the disease outbreak.

This dashboard is an example of how information from CSV could be analyzed with IRIS Analytics and deployed to GCP Kubernetes in a form of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

Added the interactive map of the USA:

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Imagine you want to see what InterSystems can give you in terms of data analytics. You studied the theory and now you want some practice. Fortunately, InterSystems provides a project that contains some good examples: Samples BI. Start with the README file, skipping anything associated with Docker, and go straight to the step-by-step installation. Launch a virtual instance, install IRIS there, follow the instructions for installing Samples BI, and then impress the boss with beautiful charts and tables. So far so good.

Inevitably, though, you’ll need to make changes.

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InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence allows you to keep your cubes up to date in multiple ways. This article will cover building vs synchronizing. There are also ways to manually keep cubes up to date, but these are very special cases and almost always cubes are kept current by building or synchronizing.

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Hi Developers!

Many of you publish your InterSystems ObjectScript libraries on Open Exchange and Github.

But what do you do to ease the usage and collaboration to your project for developers?

In this article, I want to introduce the way how to introduce an easy way to launch and contribute to any ObjectScript project just by copying a standard set of files to your repository.

Let's go!

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In an earlier article (hope, you’ve read it), we took a look at the CircleCI deployment system, which integrates perfectly with GitHub. Why then would we want to look any further? Well, GitHub has its own CI/CD platform called GitHub Actions, which is worth exploring. With GitHub Actions, you don’t need to rely on some external, albeit cool, service.

In this article we’re going to try using GitHub Actions to deploy the server part of InterSystems Package Manager, ZPM-registry, on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

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Over the last couple of weeks the Solution Architecture team has been working to finish off our 2019 workload: this included open-sourcing the Readmission Demo that was brought to HIMSS last year, so we could make it available to anyone looking for an interactive-way of exploring the tooling provided by IRIS.

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