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:

In the last post we scheduled 24-hour collections of performance metrics using pButtons. In this post we are going to be looking at a few of the key metrics that are being collected and how they relate to the underlying system hardware. We will also start to explore the relationship between Caché (or any of the InterSystems Data Platforms) metrics and system metrics. And how you can use these metrics to understand the daily beat rate of your systems and diagnose performance problems.

If you're building solutions on IRIS and want to use Git, that's great! Just use VSCode with a local git repo and push your changes out to the server - it's that easy.

But what if:

Date range queries going too slow for you? SQL Performance got you down? I have one weird trick that might just help you out! (SQL Developers hate this!)*

If you have a class that records timestamps when the data is added, then that data will be in sequence with your IDKEY values - that is, TimeStamp₁ < TimeStamp₂ if and only if ID₁ < ID₂ for all IDs and TimeStamp values in table - then you can use this knowledge to increase performance for queries against TimeStamp ranges. Consider the following table:

Python has become the most used programming language in the world (source: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) and SQL continues to lead the way as a database language. Wouldn't it be great for Python and SQL to work together to deliver new functionality that SQL alone cannot? After all, Python has more than 380,000 published libraries (source: https://pypi.org/) with very interesting capabilities to extend your SQL queries within Python.

Some time ago GitHub, has announced the new feature, GitHub Codespaces. It gives an ability to run VSCode in the browser, with almost the same power as it would run locally on your machine, but also with a power of clouds, so, you are able to choose the machine type with up to 32 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM.

Looks impressive, is not it? But how it could help us, to work with projects driven by InterSystems IRIS? Let's have a look, how to configure it for us.

Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS (and Cache, Ensemble, HealthShare) is a useful tool that separates SQL queries from Object Script code. Basically, it works like this: suppose that you want to use the same SQL query with different arguments in several different places.In this case you can avoid code duplication by declaring the query body as a class query and then calling this query by name. This approach is also convenient for custom queries, in which the task of obtaining the next row is defined by a developer. Sounds interesting? Then read on!

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.

Before we start talking about databases and different data models that exist, first we'd better talk about what a database is and how to use it.

A database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. It is used to store and retrieve structured, semi-structured, or raw data which is often related to a theme or activity.

At the heart of every database lies at least one model used to describe its data. And depending on the model it is based on, a database may have slightly different characteristics and store different types of data.

To write, retrieve, modify, sort, transform or print the information from the database, a software called Database Management System (DBMS) is used.

The size, capacity, and performance of databases and their respective DBMS have increased by several orders of magnitude. It has been made possible by technological advances in various areas, such as processors, computer memory, computer storage, and computer networks. In general, the development of database technology can be divided into four generations based on the data models or structure: navigational, relational, object and post-relational.

A good writer is supposed to draw you in with the title and bury the answer somewhere in the article. I suppose this makes me a bad writer – don’t think less of me, my whole feeling of self-worth comes from the opinions of internet strangers!

Apache Web Gateway with Docker

Hi, community.

In this article, we will programmatically configure an Apache Web Gateway with Docker using:

• HTTPS protocol.
• TLS\SSL to secure the communication between the Web Gateway and the IRIS instance.

We will use two images: one for the Web Gateway and the second one for the IRIS instance.

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.

This article, and following two articles of the series, is intended as a user guide for developers or system administrators, who need to work with OAuth 2.0 framework (further referred to as OAUTH for simplicity) in their InterSystems product based applications.

Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab WorkFlow
• GitLab CI/CD
• CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.