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#Best Practices

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Best Practices recommendations on how to develop, test, deploy and manage solutions on InterSystems Data Platforms better. 

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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Index

This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added.

You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting.

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In this article we are going to see how we can use the WhatsApp instant messaging service from InterSystems IRIS to send messages to different recipients. To do this we must create and configure an account in Meta and configure a Business Operation to send the messages we want.

Let's look at each of these steps in more detail.

Setting up an account on Meta

This is possibly the most complicated point of the entire configuration, since we will have to configure a series of accounts until we can have the messaging functionality.

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Enterprises need to grow and manage their global computing infrastructures rapidly and efficiently while simultaneously optimizing and managing capital costs and expenses. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing and storage services meet the needs of the most demanding Caché based application by providing
 a highly robust global computing infrastructure.

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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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++ Update: August 1, 2018

The use of the InterSystems Virtual IP (VIP) address built-in to Caché database mirroring has certain limitations. In particular, it can only be used when mirror members reside the same network subnet. When multiple data centers are used, network subnets are not often “stretched” beyond the physical data center due to added network complexity (more detailed discussion here). For similar reasons, Virtual IP is often not usable when the database is hosted in the cloud.

Network traffic management appliances such as load balancers (physical or virtual) can be used to achieve the same level of transparency, presenting a single address to the client applications or devices. The network traffic manager automatically redirects clients to the current mirror primary’s real IP address. The automation is intended to meet the needs of both HA failover and DR promotion following a disaster.

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Article
· May 25, 2016 5m read
Random Read IO Storage Performance Tool

New Tool Available

Please see PerfTools IO Test Suite for a later version of the Random Read IO tool.

Purpose

This tool is used to generate random read Input/Output (IO) from within the database. The goal of this tool is to drive as many jobs as possible to achieve target IOPS and ensure acceptable disk response times are sustained. Results gathered from the IO tests will vary from configuration to configuration based on the IO sub-system. Before running these tests ensure corresponding operating system and storage level monitoring are configured to capture IO performance metrics for later analysis.

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Article
· Jun 6, 2016 7m read
Language Extensions

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 ?

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When there's a performance issue, whether for all users on the system or a single process, the shortest path to understanding the root cause is usually to understand what the processes in question are spending their time doing. Are they mostly using CPU to dutifully march through their algorithm (for better or worse); or are they mostly reading database blocks from disk; or mostly waiting for something else, like LOCKs, ECP or database block collisions?

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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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This week I am going to look at CPU, one of the primary hardware food groups :) A customer asked me to advise on the following scenario; Their production servers are approaching end of life and its time for a hardware refresh. They are also thinking of consolidating servers by virtualising and want to right-size capacity either bare-metal or virtualized. Today we will look at CPU, in later posts I will explain the approach for right-sizing other key food groups - memory and IO.

So the questions are:

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With the advent of Embedded Python, a myriad of use cases are now possible from within IRIS directly using Python libraries for more complex operations. One such operation is the use of natural language processing tools such as textual similarity comparison.

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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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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.

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Ansible helped me solve the problem of quickly deploying Caché and application components for Data Platforms benchmarks. You can use the same tools and methodology for standing up your test labs, training systems, development or other environments. If you deploy applications at customer sites you could automate much of the deployment and ensure that system, Caché and your application are configured to your applications best practice standards.

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In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.

While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:

  • Writing code
  • REST-enabling it
  • Documenting it (as a REST API)

Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.

This is advantageous because:

  • You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
  • Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
  • Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
  • Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
  • Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec

Let's develop our API in a spec-first approach!

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Article
· Oct 24, 2016 4m read
DeepSee Troubleshooting Guide

The goal of this “DeepSee Troubleshooting Guide” is to help you track down and fix problems in your DeepSee project.

If the problem can’t be fixed by following the guidelines, you will at least have enough information to submit a WRC issue with DeepSee Support and provide all the evidence to us, so we can continue the investigation together and resolve it faster!

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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

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3KClL5zT6MY
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Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cuMLSO9NQCM
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Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

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Article
· Aug 16, 2023 11m read
Http request response time monitoring

Hi developers!

Today I would like to address a subject that has given me a hard time. I am sure this must have been the case for quite a number of you already (so-called “the bottleneck”). Since this is a broad topic, this article will only focus on identifying incoming HTTP requests that could be causing slowness issues. I will also provide you with a small tool I have developed to help identify them.

Our software is becoming more and more complex, processing a large number of requests from different sources, be it front-end or third-party back-end applications. To ensure optimal performance, it is essential to have a logging system capable of taking a few key measurements, such as the response time, the number of global references and the number of lines of code executed for each HTTP response. As part of my work, I get involved in the development of EMR software as well as incident analysis. Since user load comes mostly from HTTP requests (REST API or CSP application), the need to have this type of measurement when generalized slowness issues occur has become obvious.

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I have challenged to create a bot application using Azure Bot that can retrieve and post data to IRIS for Health.

A patient's data has already been registered in the FHIR repository of IRIS for Health.

The patient's MRN is 1001. His name is Taro Yamada. (in Japanese :山田 太郎)

This bot can post new pulse oximeter readings as an observation resource linked to the patient.

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This formation, accessible on my GitHub, will cover, in half a hour, how to read and write in csv and txt files, insert and get inside the IRIS database and a distant database using Postgres or how to use a FLASK API, all of that using the Interoperability framework using ONLY Python following the PEP8 convention.

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