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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. 

Some time ago I got a WRC case transferred where a customer asks for the availability of a raw DEFLATE compression/decompression function built-in Caché.

When we talk about DEFLATE we need to talk about Zlib as well, since Zlib is the de-facto standard free compression/decompression library developed in the mid-90s.

Zlib works on particular DEFLATE compression/decompression algorithm and the idea of encapsulation within a wrapper (gzip, zlib, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib

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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.

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In an ever-changing world, companies must innovate to stay competitive. This ensures that they’ll make decisions with agility and safety, aiming for future results with greater accuracy.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools help companies make intelligent decisions instead of relying on trial and error. These intelligent decisions can make the difference between success and failure in the marketplace.
Microsoft Power BI is one of the industry’s leading business intelligence tools. With just a few clicks, Power BI makes it easy for managers and analysts to explore a company’s data. This is important because when data is easy to access and visualize, it’s much more like it’ll be used to make business decisions.


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Most of us are more or less familiar with Docker. Those who use it like it for the way it lets us easily deploy almost any application, play with it, break something and then restore the application with a simple restart of the Docker container.

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Article
· Feb 11, 2019 4m read
Using Oauth2 with SOAP (Web)Services

Hi guys,

Couple days ago, a customer approached me with the wish to enhance their existing legacy application, that uses SOAP (Web)Services so it shares the same authorization with their new application API based on REST. As their new application uses OAuth2, the challenge was clear; how to pass access token with SOAP request to the server.

After spending some time on Google, it turned out, that one of possible ways of doing so was adding an extra header element to the SOAP envelope and then making sure the WebService implementation does what is needed to validate the access token.

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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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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.

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Loading your IRIS Data to your Google Cloud Big Query Data Warehouse and keeping it current can be a hassle with bulky Commercial Third Party Off The Shelf ETL platforms, but made dead simple using the iris2bq utility.

Let's say IRIS is contributing to workload for a Hospital system, routing DICOM images, ingesting HL7 messages, posting FHIR resources, or pushing CCDA's to next provider in a transition of care. Natively, IRIS persists these objects in various stages of the pipeline via the nature of the business processes and anything you included along the way. Lets send that up to Google Big Query to augment and compliment the rest of our Data Warehouse data and ETL (Extract Transform Load) or ELT (Extract Load Transform) to our hearts desire.

A reference architecture diagram may be worth a thousand words, but 3 bullet points may work out a little bit better:

  • It exports the data from IRIS into DataFrames
  • It saves them into GCS as .avro to keep the schema along the data: this will avoid to specify/create the BigQuery table schema beforehands.
  • It starts BigQuery jobs to import those .avro into the respective BigQuery tables you specify.

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AnalyzeThis is a tool for getting a personalized preview of your own data inside of InterSystems BI. This allows you to get first hand experience with InterSystems BI and understand the power and value it can bring to your organization. In addition to getting a personalized preview of InterSystems BI through an import of a CSV file with your data, Classes and SQL Queries are now supported as Data Sources in v1.1.0!

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· Mar 14, 2018 10m read
REST Design and Development

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

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Article
· Apr 12, 2017 5m read
Bug killing development tips

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.

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Article
· Mar 28, 2019 2m read
ObjectScript error handling snippets

ObjectScript has at least three ways of handling errors (status codes, exceptions, SQLCODE, etc.). Most of the system code uses statuses but exceptions are easier to handle for a number of reasons. Working with legacy code you spend some time translating between the different techniques. I use these snippets a lot for reference. Hopefully they're useful to others as well.

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Database systems have very specific backup requirements that in enterprise deployments require forethought and planning. For database systems, the operational goal of a backup solution is to create a copy of the data in a state that is equivalent to when application is shut down gracefully. Application consistent backups meet these requirements and Caché provides a set of APIs that facilitate the integration with external solutions to achieve this level of backup consistency.

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A few years ago, I was teaching the basics of our %UnitTest framework during Caché Foundations class (now called Developing Using InterSystems Objects and SQL). A student asked if it was possible to collect performance statistics while running unit tests. A few weeks later, I added some additional code to the %UnitTest examples to answer this question. I’m finally sharing it on the Community.

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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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Article
· Feb 13, 2017 14m read
Creating custom SNMP OIDs

This post is dedicated to the task of monitoring a Caché instance using SNMP. Some users of Caché are probably doing it already in some way or another. Monitoring via SNMP has been supported by the standard Caché package for a long time now, but not all the necessary parameters are available “out of the box”. For example, it would be nice to monitor the number of CSP sessions, get detailed information about the use of the license, particular KPI’s of the system being used and such. After reading this article, you will know how to add your parameters to Caché monitoring using SNMP.

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