Article
· Nov 11, 2017 3m read
Summary on Local Variable Scoping

This should be an overview over a subject that pops up over several places in online documentation mostly as remarks and never as dedicated chapter.

Once upon a time ... No it's not a fairy tale.
In the beginning of Caché (and before) you had your partition to run your code. Part of that partition was a space with all your local variables nicely sorted by %,A,..Z,a,...z

14 3
1 1.1K
Article
· Aug 5, 2017 3m read
Winning in GIS competition

GIS stands for Geographic Information System.
and it's not a typical arena for Caché. But it's definitely an environment with high data volume.

You see 3 major areas

- Visual front end:
A mature area well covered by a bunch of commercial and open source products.
No need for Caché there.

14 4
0 798

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.

14 10
0 2.5K
Importance and Collection of Exact Version Information ($zv / $zversion)
The explanation of:
- why collecting $zv is important (The WHY),
- what the components of $zv mean (The WHAT),
- and how to collect $zv (The HOW).
(The Ultimate $zv Guide to the ISC Galaxy in large, friendly letters)
14 4
1 1.6K

One of the reasons why I love Cache and Iris is that not only you can do anything you can imagine, also you can do it in a lot of different ways!!.

Imagine that you have an integration running with IRIS connected by ODBC you probably only run SQL queries but you can also create stored procedures and inside write the code to do everything you can imagine.

I'm going to give you some examples but the limit is your imagination!!

13 1
2 463

YASPE is the successor to YAPE (Yet Another pButtons Extractor). YASPE has been written from the ground up with many internal changes to allow easier maintenance and enhancements.

YASPE functions:

  • Parse and chart InterSystems Caché pButtons and InterSystems IRIS SystemPerformance files for quick performance analysis of Operating System and IRIS metrics.
  • Allow a deeper dive by creating ad-hoc charts and by creating charts combining the Operating System and IRIS metrics with the "Pretty Performance" option.
  • The "System Overview" option saves you from searching your SystemPerformance files for system details or common configuration options.

YASPE is written in Python and is available on GitHub as source code or for Docker containers at:


13 1
5 752
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.

13 2
8 4.6K

$LIST string format and %DynamicArray and %DynamicObject classes

IRIS, and previously Cache, contain several different ways to create a sequence containing a mixture of data values. A data sequence that has been available for many years is the $LIST string. Another more recent data sequence is the %DynamicArray class, which along with the %DynamicObject class, is part of the IRIS support for JSON string representation. These two sequences involve very different tradeoffs.

$LIST String Format

13 4
10 3.2K

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
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cuMLSO9NQCM
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

13 3
2 1.6K

Index to Articles

Published 2018-05-11 Last edit -

Hi All

I this article I detail some strategic issues that a new development UI will need to address - these are the ones that I can think of now - others may come to light during this journey.

See the webinar by Eduard Lebedyuk here from the last Global Summit describing modern web development and Caché

And, as always, if I have missed something please comment....

13 13
2 1.6K

InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

  1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

  2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

  3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

  4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

  5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

13 1
8 2.3K

Intro

Please note, this article is considered deprecated, check out the new revision over here: https://community.intersystems.com/post/tutorial-websockets

The goal of this post is to discuss working with Websockets in a Caché environment. We are going to have a quick discussion of what websockets are and then talk through an example chat application implemented on top of Websockets.

13 28
4 19.3K

Recently, a partner company started to develop an Angular client for their Cache application. Together, we decided to leverage the power of Caché dynamic objects to exchange JSON encoded data between client and server parts. However, we realized that currently there is a gap in Cache JSON implementation that prevents simple use of traditional registered and persistent classes to exposed their data with the same ease as with XML. I wrote a small JSON adapter, that does the job and bridgers the gap. It's purpose is simple expose data described by a regular Cache class in a one-to-one fashion to a %DynamicObject. On the other hand, when a serialized JSON data comes in, it can be easily deserialized into dynamic object and subsequently bound to regular class by the newly created adapter.

13 7
1 2.2K
Announcement
· Jul 9, 2018
Caché SQL Queries

I have finished my 4th book about Caché and MUMPS. This will probably be my last.

I am deeply grateful and humbled for all the help I have received from this group and the WW Response Center.

You all have something very special going here.

13 1
0 1.4K

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.

13 4
0 2.7K

Introduction

The field test of Caché 2016.2 has been available for quite some time and I would like to focus on one of the substantial features that is new in this version: the document data model. This model is a natural addition to the multiple ways we support for handling data including Objects, Tables and Multidimensional arrays. It makes the platform more flexible and suitable for even more use cases.

13 12
0 2.8K

Motivation

I didn't know about ObjectScript until I started my new job. Objectscript isn't actually a young programming language. Compared to C++, Java and Python, the community isn't as active, but we're keen to make this place more vibrant, aren't we?

I've noticed that some of my colleagues are finding it tricky to get their heads around the class relationships in these huge projects. There aren't any easy-to-use modern class diagram tool for ObjectScript.

Related Work

I have tried relavant works:

12 7
4 267

The %Net.SSH.Session class lets you connect to servers using SSH. It's most commonly used with SFTP, especially in the FTP inbound and outbound adaptors.

In this article, I'm going to give a quick example of how to connect to an SSH server using the class, describe your options for authenticating, and how to debug when things go wrong.

Here's an example of making the connection:

12 4
1 6.4K

[Background]

InterSystems IRIS family has a nice utility ^SystemPerformance (as known as ^pButtons in Caché and Ensemble) which outputs the database performance information into a readable HTML file. When you run ^SystemPerformance on IRIS for Windows, a HTML file is created where both our own performance log mgstat and Windows performance log are included.

12 2
4 730

Are you all ready for something you wish you knew ages ago (or, in my case, a DECADE ago)? Open up a portal in your favorite instance and go to:

System Administration->Configuration->Additional Settings->Startup

Scroll down to "Terminal Prompt" and click 'Edit'. This allows you to edit what you see on your terminal prompt. You can change that to my current setting: 8,3,2

What does this do? It adds your instance name for your prompt. So now your prompt can look like:

DEVELOPMENT:USER>

12 12
1 1.3K
InterSystems Official
· Feb 15, 2023
InterSystems Supported Platforms Update Feb-2023

InterSystems Supported Platforms Update Feb-2023

Welcome to the very first Supported Platforms Update! We often get questions about recent and upcoming changes to the list of platforms and frameworks that are supported by the InterSystems IRIS data platform. This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap.

We’re planning to publish this kind of update approximately every 3 months and then re-evaluate in a year. If you find this update useful, let us know! We’d also appreciate suggestions for how to make it better.

With that said, on to the update…

12 1
1 1.4K