Article
· Feb 24 2m read
The bewitched line terminator

I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

  • CR+LF is typical for Windows
  • LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
  • CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

25 0
1 380

Hi colleagues!

Every day Johns Hopkins University publishes new data on coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic status.

I built a simple InterSystems IRIS Analytics dashboard using InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in docker deployed on GCP Kubernetes which shows key measures of the disease outbreak.

This dashboard is an example of how information from CSV could be analyzed with IRIS Analytics and deployed to GCP Kubernetes in a form of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

Added the interactive map of the USA:

19 13
3 1K

iris-docker-multi-stage-script

A python script to keep your docker iris images in shape ;)

Witout changing your dockerfile or your code you can reduce the size of your image by 50% or more !

TL;DR

Name the builder image builder and the final image final and add this to end of your Dockerfile:

Modify your Dockerfile to use a multi-stage build:

ARG IMAGE=intersystemsdc/irishealth-community:latest
FROM $IMAGE as builder

Add this to end of your Dockerfile:

FROM $IMAGE as final

ADD --chown=${ISC_PACKAGE_MGRUSER}:${ISC_PACKAGE_IRISGROUP} https://github.com/grongierisc/iris-docker-multi-stage-script/releases/latest/download/copy-data.py /irisdev/app/copy-data.py

RUN --mount=type=bind,source=/,target=/builder/root,from=builder \
    cp -f /builder/root/usr/irissys/iris.cpf /usr/irissys/iris.cpf && \
    python3 /irisdev/app/copy-data.py -c /usr/irissys/iris.cpf -d /builder/root/ 

Boom! You're done!

17 11
8 743

Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab WorkFlow
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

16 1
4 4.6K

This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

15 11
3 29.2K
InterSystems Official
· Aug 21, 2020
Introducing InterSystems Container Registry

I am pleased to announce the availability of InterSystems Container Registry. This provides a new distribution channel for customers to access container-based releases and previews. All Community Edition images are available in a public repository with no login required. All full released images (IRIS, IRIS for Health, Health Connect, System Alerting and Monitoring, InterSystems Cloud Manager) and utility images (such as arbiter, Web Gateway, and PasswordHash) require a login token, generated from your WRC account credentials.

15 14
7 2.1K

Docker 20.10.14 (released March 23, 2022) changes the Linux capabilities given to containers in a manner that is incompatible with the Linux capability checker in InterSystems IRIS 2021.1 (and up) containers.

Users running Docker 20.10.14 on Linux will find that IRIS 2021.1+ containers will fail to start and the logs will incorrectly report that required Linux capabilities are missing. For example:

13 9
0 2.2K

InterSystems supports use of the InterSystems IRIS Docker images it provides on Linux only. Rather than executing containers as native processes, as on Linux platforms, Docker for Windows creates a Linux VM running under Hyper-V, the Windows virtualizer, to host containers. These additional layers add complexity that prevents InterSystems from supporting Docker for Windows at this time.

12 12
6 4K
Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a Container?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

12 20
1 2.5K
Announcement
· Mar 27, 2020
Give it a try on SQLBuilder tool

SQLBuilder is a flexible and powerful SQL query string builder for InterSystems IRIS,

With SQLBuilder you have nice and clean object oriented methods, instead of having to use concatenation and substituition to generate dynamic queries.

A Dynamic SQL without SQLBuilder

A Dynamic SQL with SQLBuilder

11 18
5 665

Hi developer folks!

Thanks to all of you who start the development with InterSystems IRIS from the basic development template!

Recently, thanks to @Dmitry Maslennikov's contributions I've updated the Dockerfile to make the development simpler, images lighter and the building process faster. And it looks more beautiful too ;)

Here is what changed:

11 4
2 496
Article
· Dec 25, 2021 2m read
AOC2021-rcc

After >40 years of writing in-countable lines of code in M*/COS/ISOS (and a bunch of archaic languages)
I decided for myself to set a strong signal for the future. We have Embedded Python available
(still pre-release)! I just felt it as a sacrilege to ignore this excellent NEW opportunity and
stay with the old sermon that I had used for decades.

11 0
0 330

Over the last couple of weeks the Solution Architecture team has been working to finish off our 2019 workload: this included open-sourcing the Readmission Demo that was brought to HIMSS last year, so we could make it available to anyone looking for an interactive-way of exploring the tooling provided by IRIS.

11 2
1 1.3K

Last week saw the launch of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform in sunny California.

For the engaging eXPerience Labs (XP-Labs) training sessions, my first customer and favourite department (Learning Services), was working hard assisting and supporting us all behind the scene.

11 3
0 1K
Article
· Dec 4, 2015 3m read
Atelier Beta Cloud Infrastructure

A few people wrote to me asking about the infrastructure behind the Atelier Server implementation. Its neat and a worthwhile story to share so I am writing it up here as a post on the community. I want to go in to a little detail on why it was needed and then I will outline in detail how we went about implementing this.

10 24
0 1.1K

Hi Developers!

Many of you publish your InterSystems ObjectScript libraries on Open Exchange and Github.

But what do you do to ease the usage and collaboration to your project for developers?

In this article, I want to introduce the way how to introduce an easy way to launch and contribute to any ObjectScript project just by copying a standard set of files to your repository.

Let's go!

10 21
6 2.1K

Hi Community!

We're pleased to announce that that InterSystems IRIS Community Edition is available on the Docker Store! InterSystems IRIS Community Edition is the no-cost developer edition designed to lower the barriers to entry to get started with IRIS. Now that it is listed on the Docker Store, running an IRIS Community instance is as easy as -

10 14
2 3.8K

Hi Developers!

In March we are starting our first InterSystems IRIS Programming Contest! It's a competition in creating open-source solutions using InterSystems IRIS Data Platform.

The topic for the first contest is InterSystems IRIS, Docker and ObjectScript!

The contest will last three weeks: March 9-31, 2020.

Prizes:

There will be money prizes for Experts Nomination - winners will be determined by a specially selected jury:

🥇 1st place - $2,000

🥈 2nd place - $1,000

🥉 3rd place - $500

Also, there will be Community Nomination - an application that will receive the most votes in total:

🏆 1st place - $1,000

And we provide winners with high-level badges on Global Masters.

10 27
4 1.8K
Article
· Jan 2, 2022 3m read
DB Migration using SQLgateway

Thanks to @Yuri Marx we have seen a very nice example for DB migration from Postgres to IRIS.
My personal problem is the use of DBeaver as a migration tool.
Especially as one of the strengths of IRIS ( and also Caché) before is the availability of the
SQLgateways that allow access to any external Db as long as for them an access usinig
JDBC or ODBC is available. So I extended the package to demonstrate this.

10 3
2 677
Article
· May 14, 2020 1m read
IRS Docker micro Durability

Allow limited durability for demo and development IRIS-Docker-micro-Durability During development of a container based demo I found the need to access a fresh docker
an instance of IRIS image (e.g intersystems/iris-community:2020.2.0.199.0) over and over.
To bypass loading my code repeatedly I developed this workaround.

It is a reduced variant of Docker - light weight durability

10 0
1 266