In this article I'll show you how to set up in your laptop, very quickly, a cluster of IRIS nodes in sharding. It's not the goal of this article neither to talk about sharding in detail nor define a deployment of a production ready architecture, but to show how to set up quickly, in your own machine, a cluster of IRIS instances configured as shard nodes, with which you'll able to play and test this functionality. If you're insterested in knowing more about sharding in IRIS, take a look at the documentation clicking here.

First and foremost, I want to remark that IRIS sharding will allow us 2 things:

  • Define, load and query shard tables, which data will be distributed transparently between the cluster's nodes
  • Define federated tables, which offer a global and composed view of data belonging to different tables that will be physically stored in different distributed nodes

So, as I said, we let for other article playing with shard or federated tables, and just focus now in the previous step, that is, setting up the cluster of shard nodes.

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As applications grow, every database eventually hits scaling limits. Whether it's storage capacity, concurrent users, query throughput, or I/O bandwidth, single-server architectures have inherent constraints. This guide explains fundamental approaches to database scalability and shows how InterSystems IRIS implements these patterns to support enterprise-scale workloads.

We'll explore two complementary scaling strategies: horizontal scaling for user volume (distributing computational load) and sharding for data volume (partitioning datasets). Understanding the general principles behind these approaches will help you make informed decisions about when and how to scale your IRIS applications.

The examples in this guide use InterSystems IRIS in Docker containers.

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Here are the technology bonuses for the InterSystems Developer Tools Contest 2025 that will give you extra points in the voting:

  • IRIS Vector Search usage -3
  • Embedded Python usage -3
  • InterSystems Interoperability - 3
  • InterSystems IRIS BI - 3
  • VSCode Plugin - 3
  • FHIR Tools - 3
  • Docker container usage -2
  • ZPM Package Deployment - 2
  • Implement InterSystems Community Idea - 4
  • Find a bug in Embedded Python - 2
  • Article on Developer Community - 2
  • The second article on Developer Community - 1
  • Video on YouTube - 3
  • First Time Contribution - 3

See the details below.<--break->

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Article
· Dec 3, 2025 28m read
Security in IRIS

Security is fundamental to enterprise application development. InterSystems IRIS provides a comprehensive security framework that protects data, controls access, and ensures compliance. This guide introduces essential security features for developers new to IRIS, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and practical implementation strategies.

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