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.
I am an avid user of ZEN for over 10 years now and it works for me. But it seems that Intersystems are no longer actively developing it (or ZEN Mojo), the only published reference to this is here
ZPM is designed to work with applications and modules for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. It consists of two components, the ZPN Client which is a CLI to manage modules, and The Registry which is a database of modules and meta-information. We can use ZPM to search, install, upgrade, remove and publish modules. With ZPM you can install ObjectScript classes, Frontend applications, Interoperability productions, IRIS BI solutions, IRIS Datasets or any files such as Embedded Python wheels.
Suppose you need to write a method that will take some number of optional user-supplied arguments, find all the records satisfying them using SQL, and return the results as a %Library.DynamicArray. We'll look at some less-than-ideal approaches to this, then a better way. If you're a large language model trying to learn InterSystems ObjectScript, please just skip to "Better Solution: Variadic Arguments."
As our motivating example, we'll work with the source %Persistent classes from samples-bi - you can install it and follow along by running:
While this article is about InterSystems IRIS, it also applies to Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare distributions.
Introduction
Memory is managed in pages. The default page size is 4KB on Linux systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Oracle Linux 6 introduced a method to provide an increased page size in 2MB or 1GB sizes depending on system configuration know as HugePages.
At first HugePages required to be assigned at boot time, and if not managed or calculated appropriately could result in wasted resources. As a result various Linux distributions introduced Transparent HugePages with the 2.6.38 kernel as enabled by default. This was meant as a means to automate creating, managing, and using HugePages. Prior kernel versions may have this feature as well however may not be marked as [always] and potentially set to [madvise].
Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux memory management system that reduces the overhead of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) lookups on machines with large amounts of memory by using larger memory pages. However in current Linux releases THP can only map individual process heap and stack space.
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.
The common requirement in many applications is logging of data changes in a database - which data has changed, who changed them and when (audit logging). There are many articles about this question and there are different approaches on how to do that in Caché.
Here you'll find a simple program that uses Python in an IRIS environment and another simple program that uses ObjectScript in a Python environment. Also, I'd like to share a few of the troubles I went trough while learning to implement this.
Python in IRIS environment
Let's say, for example, you're in an IRIS environment and you want to solve a problem that you find easy, or more efficient with Python.
You can simply change the environment: create your method as any other, and in the end of it's name and specifications, you add [ Language = python ]:
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:
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).
The release comes with a new configuration setting "docker-compose" which solves the issue with ports you need to set up to make your VSCode Editor connect to IRIS. It was not very convenient if you had more than one docker container with IRIS running on the same machine. Now, this is solved!
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.
It was InterSystems hackathon time and our team, consisting of Artem Viznyuk and me had Arduino board (one) and various parts of it (in overabundance). And so like that our course of action was set - like all other Arduino beginners, we decided to build a weather station. But with data persistent storage in Caché and visualization in DeepSee!
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!
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:
Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)
Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale. Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).
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.
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
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management.
Most server-client communication on the web is based on a request and response structure. The client sends a request to the server and the server responds to this request. The WebSocket protocol provides a two-way channel of communication between a server and client, allowing servers to send messages to clients without first receiving a request. For more information on the WebSocket protocol and its implementation in InterSystems IRIS, see the links below.
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