#Caché

This is the third article (see Part 1 and Part 2) where I continue to introduce you to the internal structure of Caché databases. This time, I will tell you a few interesting things and explain how my Caché Blocks Explorer project can help make your work more productive.

InterSystems periodically updates our software release policies and practices to adjust to customer needs.

We're now changing our maintenance release cadence in order to be more predictable for customers and partners, and tweaking a few other areas.

Cache tricks

Several years ago, long before Developer Community Portal was launched, I published a series of Caché tricks at one of Czech web sites. In this article, I’m posting translated version of one of them.

Capturing output of someone else’s methods or routines

Suppose you, or someone else created a useful method or routine, that was producing some computation that you’d like to benefit from, but the routine was writing output to process principal device.

You would like to use the data, but you need it not written to a device, but assigned to a variable. And, for any reason, you can’t modify the code. What can you do?

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:

I'm pleased to announce a major release of the InterSystems Server Manager extension. It has gained a UI!

Read more at Open Exchange.

Right now version 2.0 is like an aircraft at the start of the runway (remember those days before COVID-19?), waiting for the control tower to give final clearance. Will you be an early adopter, downloading the VSIX from GitHub, installing it into your VS Code, and posting back here to confirm that we haven't left anything critical behind at the gate? Then I'll push the throttles forward, publish to Marketplace, and we'll all be on our way.

Server Manager 2.0 is my entry for the current contest. If you like it maybe you'll vote for me it.

Pouring The Coffee: Creating and scheduling a task

Don't you wish a fresh, hot cup of coffee could be waiting for you right when you get into the office? Let's automate that!

Cache and IRIS come with a built-in Task Manager, which should have a familiar feel to those used to using the Windows task scheduler or using cron on Linux. Your user account will need access to the %Admin_Task resource to use it, and you can access it in the management portal under System Operation -> Task Manager. When first installed, there are roughly 20 types of task that you can schedule.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

To create a user-defined error you need to prepare the XML that describes the error code and corresponding message that you want to use as a user-defined error.

Please set the error code as a negative integer.

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.

New WRC Customer Interface

Come check out the new WRC interface we have made available to supported customer.

Some of the new features available to you are:

Organization Dashboard – gives an overview of your organizations activity for this year

This is the first article of a series diving into visualization tools and analysis of time series data. Obviously we are most interested in looking at performance related data we can gather from the Caché family of products. However, as we'll see down the road, we are absolutely not limited to that. For now we are exploring python and the libraries/tools available within that ecosystem.

Note (October 2022): yape has been deprecated and replaced by YASPE, there is no more development on yape.

Note (June 2019): A lot has changed, for the latest details go here

One of the great availability and scaling features of Caché is Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). With consideration during application development distributed processing using ECP allows a scale out architecture for Caché applications. Application processing can scale to very high rates from a single application server to the processing power of up to 255 application servers with no application changes.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

A tool (^GLOBUFF utility) is available to check the database cache usage for each global variable.

You can run the utility directly or programmatically in the %SYS namespace.

Here's how to run the utility directly:

Developing a Full-Stack JavaScript web app with Caché requires you to bring together the right building blocks. Previously, I outlined the basic steps to install and connect Node.js to Caché and make it's powerful multi-model database capabilites available for use with Node.js. You can use Caché as a NoSQL-, document- (with unique key-level access!), SQL- and object-database with Node.js. When developing JavaScript applications, you'll see how powerful this combination is and makes Caché a perfect fit for Node.js.

In the first part of this article series I will show how to get started with the React framework, one of the most popular frameworks currently taking over front-end development. In the next parts you'll learn how to connect a basic web app to a Caché back-end.

You'll see, it's very easy to get started with this technology - you can even compare the amount of basic knowledge you need to COS because you only need to know a few basic concepts to start!