Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

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A feature I recently used in working on ISC internal applications is the ability to send emails on behalf of someone. This is useful when generating system notifications from an application when you want some of them to show up as being from a specific person, perhaps posting comments on a work ticket.

In my case I was updating our facilities work order system for tracking requests. Normally all notification emails are sent from the same noreply email address. I wanted to change that so comments added from the original requester would show up as being from them and stand out.

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Article
· Mar 2, 2017 1m read
Trusting the code you import

As more people join Developer Community, and with increasing efforts to promote code sharing, I'd like to draw fresh attention to this post I wrote a year ago. It spotlights a feature within the class compiler which is both useful and dangerous. When importing code (e.g. from an XML export of classes received from someone), it's worth considering the risks.

Even if that post doesn't seem relevant to you at the moment you may wish to note it for the future. A handy way of doing this is to click the star icon at the end of it.

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Article
· Feb 24, 2017 1m read
Collision for SHA-1 hash algorithm

The recent announcement of a collision for the SHA-1 hash algorithm has caused some consternation:

https://shattered.io/

Here is some background to help put this in perspective.

Cryptographic hash functions can have a variety of properties. The property at issue here is:

"Collision resistance - it is computationally infeasible to find any two distinct inputs x, x' which hash to the same output, i.e., such that h(x) = h(x')."

(Menezes, van Oorchot, and Vanstone, "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", section 9.2.2)

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: The inconspicuous Menu button

Amongst the large fonts and chunky icons of Portal's pages, the Menu button in the top left corner is easily overlooked:

When clicked, it often produces the following menu:

When I remember it's there, I find the "View Console Log" option particularly handy.

I wrote "often" above because I've also noticed that the Menu contents change when I'm on a page within the Ensemble section of Portal:

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Article
· Feb 14, 2017 1m read
Portal tip: Feel at home on the Home page

Until recently I didn't pay much attention to Portal's home page:

If it's not showing when you initially launch Portal you can easily jump to it using the button / tab at the top of the left-hand column of options. And later during your session, get there via the Home link that will be visible at the top of every page.

On the Home page the "Recent" section is automatically maintained for you.

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In last week's discussion we created a simple graph based on the data input from one file. Now, as we all know, sometimes we have multiple different datafiles to parse and correlate. So this week we are going to load additional perfmon data and learn how to plot that into the same graph.
Since we might want to use our generated graphs in reports or on a webpage, we'll also look into ways to export the generated graphs.

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This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)
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Points to remember before you start:

  1. It is not possible in a COS (Caché Object Script) job/process context to have multiple Named Pipes. It is a one Named Pipe per job/process limited line of communication.
  1. Named Pipes, in Caché, like most pipes on most operating systems are Unidirectional. That means you open them for either Read or Write, but not both.
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The class %Compiler.UDL.TextServices arrived in 2015.1, bringing us methods for exporting a class in UDL format (i.e. looking just like we're used to seeing it in Studio), and importing a UDL format definition back into a namespace. Some source control tools including our Deltanji are now able to use UDL format, resulting in diffs that are easier to understand.

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Article
· Jan 16, 2017 15m read
Part I – Thoughts about package manager

Have you ever thought what could be a reason why some development environment (database, language) would eventually become popular? What part of this popularity could be explain as language quality? What by new and idioms approaches introduced by early language adopters? What is due to healthy ecosystem collaboration? What is due to some marketing genius?

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So I know it's been a while, and I hate to let my adoring fans down... just not enough to actually start writing again. But the wait is over and I'm back! Now bask in my beautiful ginger words!

For this series, I am going to look at some common problems we see in the WRC and discuss some common solutions. Of course, even if you find a solution here, you are always welcome to call in and expression you gratitude, or just hear my voice!

This week's common problem: "My query returns no data."

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Article
· Jan 6, 2017 4m read
Atelier, The XML Contents Editor

This article is one of the series which introduces Eclipse to experienced Caché/ Ensemble/ HealthShare users. The goal is to open the perspective of a developer who was using Caché Studio for years and make Her/ Him see deeply into the Eclipse world – far beyond Atelier. In other words it is an Atelier (Eclipse IDE for InterSystems technology) beginner’s guide. This time the topic is: editing XML files using Atelier.

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