#Caché

Apache Spark has rapidly become one of the most exciting technologies for big data analytics and machine learning. Spark is a general data processing engine created for use in clustered computing environments. Its heart is the Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) which represents a distributed, fault tolerant, collection of data that can be operated on in parallel across the nodes of a cluster. Spark is implemented using a combination of Java and Scala and so comes as a library that can run on any JVM.

During recent large scale benchmarking activities, we were seeing excessive %sys CPU time that negatively impacted scaling of the application.

Problem

In OS X 10.8 and earlier, PHP was built with ODBC support, making it easy to connect to a Caché database:

$ php -r 'phpinfo();' |grep 'ODBC Support'
ODBC Support => enabled

However, this support was removed in OS X 10.9:

Have some free text fields in your application that you wish you could search efficiently? Tried using some methods before but found out that they just cannot match the performance needs of your customers? Do I have one weird trick that will solve all your problems? Don’t you already know!? All I do is bring great solutions to your performance pitfalls!

As usual, if you want the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version, skip to the end. Just know you are hurting my feelings.

Hi!

It is often necessary to run some external command such as a python program or a shell script from inside Caché/Ensemble. There are three ways of doing this:

If you’ve ever wondered whether there is a way to regulate access to resources in Caché, wonder no more. In version 2014.2 special classes were added that allow developers to work with semaphores.

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.

InterSystems products (IRIS, Caché, Ensemble) already include a built-in Apache web server. But the built-in server is designed for the development and administration tasks and thus has certain limitations. Though you may find some useful workarounds for these limitations, the more common approach is to deploy a full-scale web server for your production environment. This article describes how to set up Apache to work with InterSystems products and how to provide HTTPS access. We will be using Ubuntu, but the configuration process is almost the same for all Linux distributions.

In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to Caché. The goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running.

GraphQL is a standard for declaring data structures and methods of data access that serves as a middleware layer between the client and the server. If you’ve never heard about GraphQL, here is a couple of useful online resources: here, here and here.

In this article, I will tell you how you can use GraphQL in your projects based on InterSystems technologies.

Date range queries going too slow for you? SQL Performance got you down? I have ANOTHER weird trick that SQL Developers don't want you to know!*

In our last lesson, we implemented a linkage to our WidgetAccessory class, and debugged some errors we encountered along the way. We now have our data being returned by REST, but what if we want to update or add new data to our application?

Globals, these magic swords for storing data, have been around for a while, but not many people can use them efficiently or know about this super-weapon altogether.

If you use globals for tasks where they truly shine, the results may be amazing, either in terms of increased performance or dramatic simplification of the overall solution (1, 2).

Globals offer a special way of storing and processing data, which is completely different from SQL tables. They were first introduced in 1966 in the M(UMPS) programming language, which was initially used in medical databases. It is still used in the same way, but has also been adopted by some other industries where reliability and high performance are top priorities: finance, trading, etc.

Later M(UMPS) evolved into Caché ObjectScript (COS). COS was developed by InterSystems as a superset of M. The original language is still accepted by developers' community and alive in a few implementations. There are several signs of activity around the web: MUMPS Google group, Mumps User's group), effective ISO Standard, etc.

Modern global based DBMS supports transactions, journaling, replication, partitioning. It means that they can be used for building modern, reliable and fast distributed systems.

Globals do not restrict you to the boundaries of the relational model. They give you the freedom of creating data structures optimized for particular tasks. For many applications reasonable use of globals can be a real silver bullet offering speeds that developers of conventional relational applications can only dream of.

Globals as a method of storing data can be used in many modern programming languages, both high- and low-level. Therefore, this article will focus specifically on globals and not the language they once came from.

If your application is raising <PROTECT> errors and you're finding it hard to work out why, here's a way to get additional information.

First, if auditing is not already enabled, turn it on:

Then use "Configure System Events" (highlighted above) and locate the event named %System/%Security/Protect. In the screenshot below I used the Filter field to do this (type "protect" - highlighted below - and press TAB):