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#Best Practices

37

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

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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++ 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
· 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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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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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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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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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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InterSystems supports use of the InterSystems IRIS Docker images it provides on Linux only. Rather than executing containers as native processes, as on Linux platforms, Docker for Windows creates a Linux VM running under Hyper-V, the Windows virtualizer, to host containers. These additional layers add complexity that prevents InterSystems from supporting Docker for Windows at this time.

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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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The object and relational data models of the Caché database support three types of indexes, which are standard, bitmap, and bitslice. In addition to these three native types, developers can declare their own custom types of indexes and use them in any classes since version 2013.1. For example, iFind text indexes use that mechanism.

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Article
· Nov 14, 2016 14m read
Mastering the JDBC SQL Gateway

As we all know, Caché is a great database that accomplishes lots of tasks within itself. However, what do you do when you need to access an external database? One way is to use the Caché SQL Gateway via JDBC. In this article, my goal is to answer the following questions to help you familiarize yourself with the technology and debug some common problems.

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Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a Container?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

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In this article I would like to present the RESTForms project - generic REST API backend for modern web applications.

The idea behind the project is simple -after I wrote several REST APIs I realized that generally, REST API consists of two parts:

  • Work with persistent classes
  • Custom business logic

And, while you'll have to write your own custom business logic, RESTForms provides all things related to working with persistent classes right out of the box.
Use cases

  • You already have a data model in Caché and you want to expose some (or all) of the information in a form of REST API
  • You are developing a new Caché application and you want to provide a REST API
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++Update: August 2, 2018

This article provides a reference architecture as a sample for providing robust performing and highly available applications based on InterSystems Technologies that are applicable to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare, TrakCare, and associated embedded technologies such as DeepSee, iKnow, Zen and Zen Mojo.

Azure has two different deployment models for creating and working with resources: Azure Classic and Azure Resource Manager. The information detailed in this article is based on the Azure Resource Manager model (ARM).

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Article
· Apr 26, 2017 2m read
How to install and use TFS in Atelier

Hi,

This is a quick tutorial how to install and use TFS in Atelier. It is based on my self experience and some tricks that I 've noted.

If you are used to using visual studio maybe you feel that is a bit slow and heavy, but you have the same TFS panel as you have in Visual Studio, so don't need any special "training" to use it smiley

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This article will describe and include an example of how to embed an external PDF file into an HL7 segment, specifically ADT_A01:2.3.1 OBX(). This can be useful when attempting to insert pictures or other external data into an HL7 message. In this example, the name of the PDF file to be embedded is provided in the incoming HL7 message in OBX(1):ObservationValue field.

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