Mirroring 101

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive, and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. Mirroring provides automatic failover under a broad range of planned and unplanned outage scenarios, with application recovery time typically limited to seconds. Logical data replication eliminates storage as a single point of failure and a source of data corruption. Upgrades can be executed with little or no downtime.

9 22
2 7.1K
Article
· May 25, 2016 5m read
Random Read IO Storage Performance Tool

New Tool Available

Please see PerfTools IO Test Suite for a later version of the Random Read IO tool.

Purpose

This tool is used to generate random read Input/Output (IO) from within the database. The goal of this tool is to drive as many jobs as possible to achieve target IOPS and ensure acceptable disk response times are sustained. Results gathered from the IO tests will vary from configuration to configuration based on the IO sub-system. Before running these tests ensure corresponding operating system and storage level monitoring are configured to capture IO performance metrics for later analysis.

14 17
2 3.5K

Astronomers’ tools

5 years ago, on December 19, 2013, the ESA launched an orbital telescope called Gaia. Learn more about the Gaia mission on the official website of the European Space Agency or in the article by Vitaly Egorov (Billion pixels for a billion stars).

However, few people know what technology the agency chose for storing and processing the data collected by Gaia. Two years before the launch, in 2011, the developers were considering a number of candidates (see “Astrostatistics and Data Mining” by Luis Manuel Sarro, Laurent Eyer, William O’Mullane, Joris De Ridder, pp. 111-112):

Comparing the technologies side-by-side produced the following results (source):

Technology Time
DB2 13min55s
PostgreSQL 8 14min50s
PostgreSQL 9 6min50s
Hadoop 3min37s
Cassandra 3min37s
Caché 2min25s

The first four will probably sound familiar even to schoolchildren. But what is Caché XEP?

10 9
1 968
Article
· Apr 9, 2019 3m read
IRIS/Ensemble as an ETL

IRIS and Ensemble are designed to act as an ESB/EAI. This mean they are build to process lots of small messages.

But some times, in real life we have to use them as ETL. The down side is not that they can't do so, but it can take a long time to process millions of row at once.

To improve performance, I have created a new SQLOutboundAdaptor who only works with JDBC.

BatchSqlOutboundAdapter

Extend EnsLib.SQL.OutboundAdapter to add batch batch and fetch support on JDBC connection.

3 7
2 1.4K
Article
· May 11, 2021 8m read
IRIS in Astronomy

In this article we are going to show the results of the comparision between IRIS and Postgress when handling Astronomy data.

Introduction

Since the earliest days of human civilization we have been fascinated by the sky at night. There are so many stars! Everybody has dreamed about them and fantasized about life in other planets.

10 7
0 631
Article
· Nov 11, 2019 11m read
Transactions in Global InterSystems IRIS

InterSystems IRIS supports a unique data structure, called globals, for information storage. Essentially, globals are persistent arrays with multi-level indices, having several extra capabilities—transactions, quick traversal of tree structures, and a programming language known as ObjectScript.

I'd note that for the remainder of the article, or at least the code samples, we'll assume you have familiarised yourself with the basics of globals:

6 7
1 817
Article
· Mar 24, 2020 2m read
BlocksExplorer map generator

I hope you already know one of my projects Cache Blocks Explorer. I've recently renamed it to Blocks Explorer.

For the recent contest, I've added a new feature, the ability to generate a static picture of any Cache or IRIS database. Like below. Where unique globals have a unique color. This is how looks like inside 9.5GB database. Where 1 pixel represents one block. By link on image you will get even bigger image, with more detalization.

2 6
0 332

It seems like yesterday when we did a small project in Java to test the performance of IRIS, PostgreSQL and MySQL (you can review the article we wrote back in June at the end of this article). If you remember, IRIS was superior to PostgreSQL and clearly superior to MySQL in insertions, with no big difference in queries.

7 6
3 439

Spoilers: Daily Integrity Checks are not only a best practice, but they also provide a snapshot of global sizes and density.

Update:
Many of the below utilities now offer a mode to estimate the size with <2% error on average with orders of magnitude improvements in performance and IO requirements. I continue to urge regular Integrity Checks, however there are situations where more urgent answers are needed.

8 5
5 1.3K

As a former JAVA developer it has always been a challenge to decide which database was the most suitable for the project we were going to develop, one of the main criteria I used was their performance, as well as their HA configuration capabilities ( high availability). Well, now is the time to put IRIS to the test with respect to some of the most commonly used databases, so I've decided to create a small Java project based on SpringBoot that connects via JDBC with a MySQL database, another of PostgreSQL and finally with IRIS.

7 5
0 346
Article
· Jun 4, 2020 1m read
Easy data import into IRIS

Sometimes you need quickly and easily import data into IRIS. For this, an IRIS import manager has been developed.

This application allows you to import JSON data and also provides a really simple interface for transferring data from MongoDB collections to IRIS globals. It has never been so easy.

Let's look at examples.

Import JSON

2 5
0 558

The following post outlines an architectural design of intermediate complexity for DeepSee. As in the previous example, this implementation includes separate databases for storing the DeepSee cache, DeepSee implementation and settings. This post introduces two new databases: the first to store the globals needed for synchronization, the second to store fact tables and indices.

5 5
0 683
Article
· Aug 2, 2022 8m read
Data models in InterSystems IRIS

Before we start talking about databases and different data models that exist, first we'd better talk about what a database is and how to use it.

A database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. It is used to store and retrieve structured, semi-structured, or raw data which is often related to a theme or activity.

At the heart of every database lies at least one model used to describe its data. And depending on the model it is based on, a database may have slightly different characteristics and store different types of data.

To write, retrieve, modify, sort, transform or print the information from the database, a software called Database Management System (DBMS) is used.

The size, capacity, and performance of databases and their respective DBMS have increased by several orders of magnitude. It has been made possible by technological advances in various areas, such as processors, computer memory, computer storage, and computer networks. In general, the development of database technology can be divided into four generations based on the data models or structure: navigational, relational, object and post-relational.

15 5
3 1.5K
Article
· Dec 20, 2021 1m read
Holiday Reading: What Lies Beneath!

For those of you who might be new to IRIS, and even those who have used Cache or IRIS for some time but want to explore beyond its usually-assumed boundaries and practices, you might want to dive into this detailed exploration of the database engine that is at its heart, and discover just what you can really do with it, going way beyond what InterSystems have done with it for you.

10 5
4 437

At the heart of IRIS and Cache is a very interesting database architecture that we, at M/Gateway Developments, refer to as "Global Storage". If you ever wanted to know more about the fundamentals and capabilities of this underlying database, you might want to read a major analysis we've put together:

https://github.com/robtweed/global_storage

Amongst other things you'll discover that:

8 4
2 551

Hello everyone, I’m a French student that just arrived in Prague for an academical exchange for my fifth year of engineering school and here is my participation in the interop contest.

I hadn’t much time to code since I was moving from France to Prague and I’m participating alone, so I decided to make a project that’s more like a template rather than an application.

4 4
0 276
Article
· May 13, 2016 1m read
mySQL data importer tool

Hi,

If you want to import data from a mySQL export file (exported with mysqldump), you will find here a little script that could help.

Only the INSERT commands in the sql file are executed into Caché. Indices are not computed for better performance.
%NOINDEX, %NOCHECK and %NOLOCK are generated on each INSERT line.

Currently, the file can not contain a "),(" pattern inside the values part of the INSERT command. If this is the case, the line is skipped. This feature may be implemented in the extractValuesList method.

2 3
0 514

What is Unstructured Data?
Unstructured data refers to information lacking a predefined data model or organization. In contrast to structured data found in databases with clear structures (e.g., tables and fields), unstructured data lacks a fixed schema. This type of data includes text, images, videos, audio files, social media posts, emails, and more.

8 3
0 213

This text is a continuation of my article where I explained the structure a Caché database. In this article, I described the types of blocks, connections between them and their relation to globals. The article was purely theoretical. I made a project that helps visualize the block tree - and this article will explain how it works in great detail.

8 3
1 1.9K

In this GitHub we gather information from a csv, use a DataTransformation to make it into a FHIR object and then, save that information to a FHIR server all that using only Python.

The objective is to show how easy it is to manipulate data into the output we want, here a FHIR Bundle, in the IRIS full Python framework.

3 3
0 458