Compatibility is the capacity for two systems to work together without having to be altered to do so.
How many times have we migrated an IRIS Instance to another machine, maybe even another version, and after a few days realized we forgot that one SSL Configuration critical for a Business Operations to work? Or maybe a credential, or a lonely class in a package by itself?
The simple solution is to make a checklist¹. A checklist of the entities we have to move. But simple checklists on Word documents are often forgotten, or just ignored.
Starting with InterSystems IRIS 2025.1, the way dependent cubes are handled in cube builds and cube synchronizes was changed.
This change may require modifying custom build/synchronize methods. If you are using the Cube Manager, these changes are already considered and handled, which means no action is needed.
Prior to this change, cubes were required to be built and synchronized in the proper order and account for any cube relationships/dependencies. With this change, dependent cubes are automatically updated as needed when using the %BuildCube or %SynchronizeCube APIs.
Up until early this year, I haven't been not doing much coding at all -- I had gotten sick of it.
After many years as a hands-on software engineer and data scientist, I got burned out around 2015. I switched to business development roles focused on "external innovation," then joined InterSystems in 2019 as a product manager. I missed the creative aspects of coding, but not the tedium. The endless cycle of boilerplate, debugging, and context-switching had left me creatively depleted.
Inevitably, you will eventually need to move your code up from one version of IRIS or Cache to a more recent version of IRIS. There are a few good steps you can take to set yourself up for success in that process.
Read Documentation Carefully
Before you move anything you should check out the IRIS documentation page for many useful resources on changes made to various versions of IRIS. If you are upgrading through multiple versions, you will want to check on the documentation for all of them, not just the version to which you will upgrade.