The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (4 of 3)

The forth in the trilogy, anyone a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan?

If you are looking to breathe new life into an old MUMPS application follow these steps to map your globals to classes and expose all that beautiful data to Objects and SQL.

If the above does not sound familiar to you please start at the beginning with the following:

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (1 of 3)

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I was recently asked whether we have a function to convert LDAP date time stamps into $HOROLOG format or other formats and the answer is not at the moment, but there is a simple method to do the conversion.

Let us look at the facts and figures involved...

1) Active Directory's (AD) date 0 (zero) is 1601-01-01 00:00:00.000 or January 1st, 1601 at midnight (00:00:00)

2) AD timestamps are calculated as the number of 100 nanosecond intervals from date 0

3) 864000000000 is the number of 100 nanosecond intervals per day

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Mirroring 101

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive, and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. Mirroring provides automatic failover under a broad range of planned and unplanned outage scenarios, with application recovery time typically limited to seconds. Logical data replication eliminates storage as a single point of failure and a source of data corruption. Upgrades can be executed with little or no downtime.

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Integrating Cache with .net may be difficult, as we need to know both technologies and tools involved. Let’s follow the simplest possible example and see the pitfalls lurking on our way.

1. Creating .Net Assembly

.Net assembly is unit that contains compiled code and other resources.

Let’s create the simplest .Net assembly that will contain the code we want to execute.

We will use assembly of type Class Library, as we will use classes and their methods contained within. This type of assembly has .dll extension.

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Suppose you have developed your own app with InterSystems technologies stack and now want to perform multiple deployments on the customers' side. During the development process you've composed a detailed installation guide for your application, because you need to not only import classes, but also fine-tune the environment according to your needs.
To address this specific task, InterSystems has created a special tool called %Installer. Read on to find out how to use it.

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** Revised Feb-12, 2018

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.

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The topic of for/while loop performance in Caché ObjectScript came up in discussion recently, and I'd like to share some thoughts/best practices with the rest of the community. While this is a basic topic in itself, it's easy to overlook the performance implications of otherwise-reasonable approaches.

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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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Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place?

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Article
· Aug 26, 2016 2m read
TLS v1.2 support in Caché

Question:

What version of Caché supports TLS v1.2?

Answer:

Caché 2015.2 announced support for TLS v1.1 and v1.2. In this version, the SSL/TLS configuration page provides checkboxes for TLS v1.1 and v1.2, which allows the versions to be configured individually. This allows sites to, for example, require TLS v1.2 only.

Additionally, some earlier versions of Caché provide undocumented support for TLS v1.1 and v1.2, specifically Caché 2014.1.3 and above and 2015.1, on Windows, Linux and Unix.

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Article
· Dec 12, 2016 3m read
Generate and Validate Captcha Code

Suppose you have developed your own web app with InterSystems technologies stack and now want to perform a captcha validation on the client side in order to determine whether or not the user is human and make it safer. There are some modern frameworks to address the captcha issue, however most part of them needs internet access to generate codes and sometimes are complex to implement. Take this as basic example considering that image recognition has gotten too good. That's why you nowadays you tend to see more pattern recognition captchas than mere reading ones. (I.e.

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Article
· Jun 13, 2016 1m read
Debug: using locks for breakpoints

Hi, Community!

Want to share with you one debugging approach from the Russian forum.

Suppose I want to debug the application and I want it to stop the execution on a particular line.

I add in code this line:

l +d,-d

When I want to start debugging in this line I block d in terminal

USER> l +d

And execute the app.

The app stops on this line and lets me connect to it with Studio debugger.

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Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky.

In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles.

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The MONITOR process (also called the Caché Monitor) scans the messages in your cconsole.log file and sends you emails based on the severity of those messages. The MONITOR is configured using the ^MONMGR utility in terminal.

The MONITOR should not be confused with the similarly named System Monitor, which checks a variety of system health and performance metrics and can log messages regarding them to the cconsole.log, where they can then be scanned by the MONITOR.

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Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Warning: if you get confused by URLs used: the original series used screens from machine called dk-gs2016. The new screenshots are taken from a different machine. You can safely treat url WIN-U9J96QBJSAG as if it was dk-gs2016.

Part 2. Authorization server, OpenID Connect server

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Article
· Mar 3, 2016 2m read
Class Projections and Projection Classes

The purpose of this post is to raise the profile of a powerful mechanism that has long been available to us, and to open a discussion about ways in which it can be used or abused.

You can read more detail about the mechanism here. To summarize, your class definition can use the Projection keyword to reference one or more projection classes. A projection class can implement methods that get invoked at key points in the lifecycle of your class.

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Here are a few examples of conversions and operations you might need, along with links to documentation where you can learn more.

At the time I wrote this, Eastern Daylight Time was in effect for my Caché system.

How Caché keeps the time and date

Caché has a simple time format, with a longer range of recognized dates compared to some other technologies.

The current time is maintained in a special variable $HOROLOG ($H):

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When using Studio, ODBC or a terminal connection to Caché or Ensemble, you may have wondered how to secure the connection. One option is to add TLS (aka SSL) to your connection. The Caché client applications - TELNET, ODBC and Studio - all understand how to add TLS to the connection. They just need to be configured to do it.

Configuring these clients is easier in 2015.1 and later. I'm going to be discussing this new method. If you're already using the old, legacy method, it will continue to work, but I would recommend you consider switching to the new one.

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Article
· Feb 5, 2016 11m read
Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS

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!

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Presenter: Anton Umnikov
Task: Identify your slowest SQL queries and tune them for better performance
Approach: Use InterSystems’ query profiling and analysis tools. Discuss how system configuration can affect performance

This session will show you how you identify the weakest link in your application SQL and introduce you to the fine art of tuning those queries. To do this we will take a look at InterSystems query profiling and analysis tools, as well as how system configuration can impact SQL performance.

Problem: Obscurity on how our SQL engine works

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

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Article
· Oct 7, 2016 4m read
Forwarding Requests in a REST Service

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.

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Let's say we have two serial classes, one as a property of another:

Class test.Serial Extends %SerialObject
{
Property Serial2 As test.Serial2;
}

Class test.Serial2 Extends %SerialObject
{
Property Property As %String;
}

And a persistent class, that has a property of test.Serial type:

Class test.Persistent Extends %Persistent
{

Property Datatype As %String;

Property Serial As test.Serial;

}

So it's a serial, inside a serial, inside a persistent object.

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