If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in Azure, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.
The main issue, when deploying to Azure, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.
To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in Azure as subnets can span several zones). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.
In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without the using Load Balancers suggested in most other Azure reference architectures.
When calling out to web services there are several settings of the Business Operation that play together in controlling what will happen when a response is not returned in the desired time.
In this article, I would show how you can upload and download files from InterSystems products via http.
The questions about working with files over http arise fairly often on community and I'm usually linking to my FileServer project which demonstrates file upload/download but I'd like to talk a bit more on how we can serve and receive files from InterSystems products.
There are three things most important to any SQL performance conversation: Indices, TuneTable, and Show Plan. The attached PDFs includes historical presentations on these topics that cover the basics of these 3 things in one place. Our documentation provides more detail on these and other SQL Performance topics in the links below. The eLearning options reinforces several of these topics. In addition, there are several Developer Community articles which touch on SQL performance, and those relevant links are also listed.
There is a fair amount of repetition in the information listed below. The most important aspects of SQL performance to consider are:
The types of indices available
Using one index type over another
The information TuneTable gathers for a table and what it means to the Optimizer
How to read a Show Plan to better understand if a query is good or bad
The last time that I created a playground for experimenting with machine learning using Apache Spark and an InterSystems data platform, see Machine Learning with Spark and Caché, I installed and configured everything directly on my laptop: Caché, Python, Apache Spark, Java, some Hadoop libraries, to name a few. It required some effort, but eventually it worked.
InterSystems SAM is a great tool to monitor your InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS For Health clusters on prem or in a cloud environment. This article describes how you can implement a customized alert handler. This is currently an undocumented and most likely an unknown feature of InterSystems SAM. With future releases it will be probably made easier to leverage this useful concept.
Suppose you have a persistent class with data and you want to have a simple Angular UI for it to view the data and make CRUD operations.
Recently @Alberto Fuentesdescribed how to build Angular UI for your InterSystems IRIS application using RESTForms2.
In this article, I want to tell you how you can get a simple Angular UI to CRUD and view your InterSystems IRIS class data automatically in less than 5 minutes.
To connect to AtScale, we will use the SQL Server Analysis Services database. Let's open it in the Power Query editor. To do that, select Transform Data on the Home. In the window that appears, go to the Home, expand New Source and select Analysis Services.
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.
I think everyone keeps the source code of the project in the repository nowadays: Github, GitLab, bitbucket, etc. Same for InterSystems IRIS projects check any on Open Exchange.
What do we do every time when start or continue working with a certain repository with InterSystems Data Platform?
We need a local InterSystems IRIS machine, have the environment for the project set up and the source code imported.
So every developer performs the following:
Check out the code from repo
Install/Run local IRIS installation
Create a new namespace/database for a project
Import the code into this new namespace
Setup all the rest environment
Start/continue coding the project
If you dockerize your repository this steps line could be shortened to this 3 steps:
Check out the code from repo
Run docker-compose build
Start/continue coding the project
Profit - no any hands-on for 3-4-5 steps which could take minutes and bring head ache sometime.
You can dockerize (almost) any your InterSystems repo with a few following steps. Let’s go!
One useful feature of our REST framework is the ability for a dispatch class to identify request prefixes and forward them to another dispatch class. This approach of modularizing your URL map will improve code readability, enable you to easily maintain separate versions of an interface, and provide a means to protect API calls that only certain users will be allowed to access.
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
Continuous Delivery
GitLab installation and configuration
GitLab CI/CD
In the previous article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:
GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.
This series of articles would cover Python Gateway for InterSystems Data Platforms. Leverage modern AI/ML tools and execute Python code and more from InterSystems IRIS. This project brings you the power of Python right into your InterSystems IRIS environment:
Say I've been developing a web application that uses IRIS as the back end. I've been working on it with unauthenticated access. It's getting to the point where I would like to deploy it to users, but first I need to add authentication. Rather than using the default IRIS password authentication, I'd like users to sign in with my organization's Single Sign On, or some other popular identity provider like Google or GitHub. I've read that OpenID Connect is a common authentication standard, and it's supported by IRIS. What is the simplest way to get up and running?
You can set the maximum size of the IRISTemp database at IRIS startup by setting a configuration parameter called MaxIRISTempSizeAtStart.
After setting, the system will truncate IRISTemp to the set value (MB) at the next IRIS startup. If the current size is less than the specified MaxIRISTempSizeAtStart, no truncation will occur. Also, if 0 is specified, truncation will not be performed, so the size will start without changing. (Default) Settings are made from the menu below.
A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel.
Writing a script for the application deployment can be very interesting to ensure rapid deployment without forgetting anything.
config-api is a library to help developers to write configuration scripts based on a JSON document.
Yet another example of applying LangChain to give some inspiration for new community Grand Prix contest.
I was initially looking to build a chain to achieve dynamic search of html of documentation site, but in the end it was simpler to borg the static PDFs instead.
I wanted to write it as a comment toarticle of @Evgeny Shvarov . But it happens to be so long, so, decided to post it separately.
I would like to add a bit of clarification about how docker uses disk space and how to clean it. I use macOS, so, everything below, is mostly for macOS, but docker commands suit any platform.
Starting in version 2021.1, InterSystems IRIS began shipping with a python runtime in the engine's kernel. However, there was no way to install packages from within the instance. The main draw of python is its enormous package ecosystem. With that in mind, I introduce my side project zpip, a pip wrapper that is callable from the iris terminal.
While starting the development with IRIS we have a distribution kit or in case of Docker we are pulling the docker image and then often we need to initialize it and setup the development environment. We might need to create databases, namespaces, turn on/off some services, create resources. We often need to import code and data into IRIS instance and run some custom code to init the solution.
And there plenty of templates on Open Exchange where we suggest how to init REST, Interoperability, Analytics, Fullstack and many other templates with ObjectScript. What if we want to use only Python to setup the development environment for Embedded Python project with IRIS?
So, the recent release of Embedded Python template is the pure python boilerplate that could be a starting point for developers that build python projects with no need to use and learn ObjectScript. This article expresses how this template could be used to initialize IRIS. Here we go!
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.
A request came from a customer to estimate how long it would take to encrypt a database with cvencrypt utility.
This question is a little bit like how long is a piece of string — it depends. But its an interesting question. The answer primarily depends on the performance of CPU and storage on the target platform the customer is using, so the answer is more about coming up with a simple methodology that can be used to benchmark the CPU and storage while running cvencrypt.
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