There's an easy new way to add certificate authority (CA) certificates to your SSL/TLS configurations on InterSystems IRIS 2019.1 (and 2018.1.2) on Windows and Mac.  You can ask IRIS to use the operating system's certificate store by entering:

%OSCertificateStore

in the field for "File containing Trusted Certificate Authority X.509 certificate(s)".   Here's an image of how to do this in the portal:

And here's a link to the documentation which describes this.  It's in the list of options under "File containing trusted Certificate Authority certificate(s)".

That's all you need to do!

I have been using embedded python for more than 2 years now on a daily basis. May be it's time to share some feedback about this journey.

Why write this feedback? Because, I guess, I'm like most of the people here, an ObjectScript developer, and I think that the community would benefit from this feedback and could better understand the pros & cons of chosing embedded python for developing stuff in IRIS. And also avoid some pitfalls.

• Feedback : Using embedded python daily for 2 years
• Introduction
• Starting with Python
  • Python is not ObjectScript
    • Pep8
    • Modules
    • Dunders
  • Conclusion
• Embedded Python
  • What is Embedded Python ?
  • How to use Embedded Python ?
  • How I use Embedded Python
    • Use Python libraries and code as they were ObjectScript classes
      • With the language tag
      • Without the language tag
      • Conclusion
    • Use a python first approach
      • Example : iris-fhir-python-strategy
      • Remarks
      • Where to find the code
        • How to implement a Strategy
        • Implementation of InteractionsStrategy
        • Implementation of Interactions
        • Interactions in Python
        • Implementation of the abstract python class
      • Too long, do a summary

What is Web Scraping:

In simple terms, Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is an automated process of collecting large data(unstructured) from websites. The user can extract all the data on particular sites or the specific data as per the requirement. The data collected can be stored in a structured format for further analysis.

Steps involved in web scraping:

1. Find the URL of the webpage that you want to scrape
2. Select the particular elements by inspecting
3. Write the code to get the content of the selected elements
4. Store the data in the required format

It’s that simple !

NB. Please be advised that PKI is not intended to produce certificates for secure production systems. You should make alternate arrangements to create certificates for your productions.
NB. PKI is deprecated as of IRIS 2024.1: documentation and announcement.

In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. I did a similar post in the past for Caché, so feel free to check that out here if you are not running InterSystems IRIS. Much like the original, the goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running. Example screenshots are taken on a 2018.1.1 version of IRIS, so yours may look slightly different.

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.

There have been some very helpful articles in the community that show how to use Grafana with IRIS (or Cache/Ensemble) by using an intermediate database.

But I wanted to get at IRIS structures directly. In particular, i wanted to access the Cache History monitor data that is accessible by SQL as described here

https://community.intersystems.com/post/apm-using-cach%C3%A9-history-mo…

and didn't want anything between me and the data.

I already had class queries that returned the data i wanted, so i just needed to embed them in a REST class that returned JSON. I haven't included my class Grafana.

Previously I showed you how to run pButtons to start collecting performance metrics that we are looking at in this series of posts.

• Part 1 - Getting started on the Journey, collecting metrics
• Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected

##Update: May 2020.

Since this post was written several years ago, we have moved from Caché to IRIS. See the comments for an updated link to the documentation for pButtons (Caché) and SystemPerformance (IRIS). Also, a note on how to update your systems to the latest versions of the performance tools.

Since Caché 2017 the SQL engine has included new set of statistics. These record the number of times a query is executed and the time it takes to run.

This is a gold mine for anyone monitoring and trying to optimize the performance of an application that includes many SQL statements but it isn’t as easy to access the data as some people want.

This article and the associated sample code explains how to use this information and how to routinely extract a summary of daily statistics and keep a historic record of the SQL performance of your application.

What is recorded?

The purpose of this post is to raise the profile of a powerful mechanism that has long been available to us, and to open a discussion about ways in which it can be used or abused.

You can read more detail about the mechanism here. To summarize, your class definition can use the Projection keyword to reference one or more projection classes. A projection class can implement methods that get invoked at key points in the lifecycle of your class.

A projection class must extend %Projection.

Does anyone NOT use a debugger? I can't remember the last time I did. It's not because I don't dislike them, I just don't need to use them. The main reason for this is because I have a certain development methodology that either produces less bugs, catches them at a unit test level, or makes tracking them down much easier.

Here are my tips...

1. Write your own COS cheat-sheet.

This is mainly for anyone that is new to COS. One of the biggest bug hazards is not knowing how certain commands and functions work.

The InterSystems IRIS has excellent support for encryption, decryption and hashing operations. Inside the class %SYSTEM.Encryption (https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20212/csp/documatic/%25CSP.Documatic…) there are class methods for the main algorithms on the market.

IRIS Algorithms and Encrypt/Decrypt types

As you can see, the operations are based on keys and include 3 options:

• Symmetric Keys: the parts running encrypt and decrypt operations share the same secret key.

Introduction

Data analytics is a crucial aspect of business decision-making in today's fast-paced world. Organizations rely heavily on data analysis to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition. In this article, we will explore how data analytics can be performed using Pandas and Intersystems Embedded Python. We will discuss the basics of Pandas, the benefits of using Intersystems Embedded Python, and how they can be used together to perform efficient data analytics.

Hello everyone,

I was first introduced to TDD almost 9 year ago, and I immediately fell in love with it. 
Nowadays it's become very popular but, unfortunately, I see that many companies don't use it. Moreover, many developers don't even know what it is exactly or how to use it, mainly beginners.

Overview

My goal with this article is to show how to use TDD with %UnitTest. I will show my workflow and explain how to use cosFaker, one of my first projects, which I created using Caché and recently uploaded to OpenExchange.

So buckle up and let's go.

What is TDD?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? Certainly more than typing a post.

Please check out my "Coding talks" on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

1. Analysing InterSystems IRIS System Performance with Yape. Part 1: Installing Yape

Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

When I describe InterSystems IRIS to more technically-minded people, I always start with how it is a multimodel DBMS at its core.

In my opinion that is its main advantage (on the DBMS side). And the data is stored only once. You just choose the access API you want to use.

• You want some sort of summary for your data? Use SQL!
• Do you want to work extensively with one record? Use objects!
• Want to access or set one value and you know the key? Use globals!

Introduction and Motivation

A unit of ObjectScript code (a ClassMethod, say) may produce a variety of unexpected side effects by interacting with parts of the system outside of its own scope and not properly cleaning up. As a non-exhaustive list, these include:

• Transactions
• Locks
• I/O devices
• SQL cursors
• System flags and settings
• $Namespace
• Temporary files

Use of these important language features without proper cleanup and defensive coding can lead to an application that normally works correctly, but that may fail in unexpected and difficult-to-debug ways.

Considering new business interest in applying Generative-AI to local commercially sensitive private data and information, without exposure to public clouds. Like a match needs the energy of striking to ignite, the Tech lead new "activation energy" challenge is to reveal how investing in GPU hardware could support novel competitive capabilities. The capability can reveal the use-cases that provide new value and savings.

Sharpening this axe begins with a functional protocol for running LLMs on a local laptop.

My local Mac has an M1 processor.

Last time we deployed a simple IRIS application to the Google Cloud. Now we’re going to deploy the same project to Amazon Web Services using its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

We assume you’ve already forked the IRIS project to your own private repository. It’s called <username>/my-objectscript-rest-docker-template in this article. <root_repo_dir> is its root directory.

Before getting started, install the AWS command-line interface and, for Kubernetes cluster creation, eksctl, a simple CLI utility. For AWS you can try to use aws2, but you’ll need to set aws2 usage in kube config file as described here.

The following steps show you how to display a sample list of metrics available from the /api/monitor service.

In the last post, I gave an overview of the service that exposes IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. The post shows how to set up and run IRIS preview release 2019.4 in a container and then list the metrics.

This post assumes you have Docker installed. If not, go and do that now for your platform :)

Step 1. Download and run the IRIS preview in docker

Follow the download instructions at Preview Distributions to download the Preview Licence Key and an IRIS Docker image.

A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel.

See: - Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected

pButtons compiles data it collects into a single html file to make it easier to send to WRC and review the collated data.

Easy, easy, I'm not promoting a war against the machines in the best sci-fi way to avoid world domination of Ultron or Skynet. Not yet, not yet 🤔

I invite you to challenge the machines through the creation of a very simple game using ObjectScript with embedded Python.

I have to say that I got super excited with the feature of Embedded Python on InterSystems IRIS, it's incredible the bunch of possibilities that opens to create fantastic apps.

Let's build a tic tac toe, the rules are quite simple and I believe that everyone knows how to play.

After a five-part series on sample iKnow applications (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), let's turn to a new feature coming up in 2017.1: the iKnow REST APIs, allowing you to develop rich web and mobile applications. Where iKnow's core COS APIs already had 1:1 projections in SQL and SOAP, we're now making them available through a RESTful service as well, in which we're trying to offer more functionality and richer results with fewer buttons and less method calls. This article will take you through the API in detail, explaining the basic principles we used when defining them and exploring the most important ones to get started.

In this article I will explain how to Authenticate, Authorize and Audit by code by using CSP Web Application along with Enabling /Disabling and Authenticate/Unauthenticate any Web Application.

• Online Demo is available on cloud https://dappsecurity.demo.community.intersystems.com/csp/user/index.csp (SuperUser | SYS)
• I recommend to watch the video before continue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFRa3njqDcA

Application Layout
 

Enterprise Monitor is a component of Ensemble and can help organizations monitor multiple productions running on different namespaces within the same instance or namespaces running on multiple instances.

Documentation can be found at:

http://docs.intersystems.com/ens20161/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=EMONITOR_all#EMONITOR_enterprise

In Ensemble 2016.1 there were changes made to make this utility work with HealthShare environments.

This article will:

• Show how to set up Enterprise Monitor for HealthShare sites
• Show some features of Enterprise Monitor
• Show some features of Enterprise Message Viewer

For this article, I used the following version of HealthShare:

Cache for Windows (x86-64) 2016.1 (Build 656U) Fri Mar 11 2016 17:42:42 EST [HealthShare Modules:Core:14.02.2415 + Linkage Engine:14.02.2415 + Patient Index:14.02.2415 + Clinical Viewer:14.02.2415 + Active Analytics:14.02.2415]

First of all, what is data anonymization?

According to Wikipedia:

Data anonymization is a type of information sanitization whose intent is privacy protection. It is the process of removing personally identifiable information from data sets, so that the people whom the data describe remain anonymous.

In other words, the data anonymization is a process that retains the data but keeps the source anonymous. Depending on the adopted anonymization technique the data is redacted, masked or substituted.

And that is the purpose of iris-Disguise, to provide a set of anonymization tools.

What is Journaling?

Journaling is a critical IRIS feature and a part of what makes IRIS a reliable database. While journaling is fundamental to IRIS, there are nuances, so I wrote this article to summarize (more briefly than our documentation which has all the details) what you need to know. I realize the irony of saying the 27 minute read is brief.

Every modification to a journaled database (sets and kills) is recorded with its timestamp in a journal file. This runs in parallel with writes to the databases and the write image journal (WIJ) for redundancy.

Last time we launched an IRIS application in the Google Cloud using its GKE service.

And, although creating a cluster manually (or through gcloud) is easy, the modern Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach advises that the description of the Kubernetes cluster should be stored in the repository as code as well. How to write this code is determined by the tool that’s used for IaC.

In the case of Google Cloud, there are several options, among them Deployment Manager and Terraform. Opinions are divided as to which is better: if you want to learn more, read this Reddit thread Opinions on Terraform vs. Deployment Manager? and the Medium article Comparing GCP Deployment Manager and Terraform. 

Business services are powerful components that pull data in from external sources. In most cases, pre-built components do the job, but sometimes you need to code custom business services. There are a few best practices to keep in mind when doing this:

1. Lean and Mean - Business services should be coded to have minimal processing. This is due to the fact that if any errors occur within the business service, no message will be sent, and thus no trace will be created. This makes it very difficult to troubleshoot.

This is a posting about a particular feature of Caché which I find useful but is probably not well known or used. I am referring to the feature of Language Extensions.

This feature allows you to extend the commands, special variables and functions available in Caché Object Script with commands, special variables and functions of your own. This functionality also applies to other languages the Caché supports at the server, including Caché Basic and Multivalue Basic.  

Why would I need or want to add new commands ?

There are a number of use cases.