Documentation

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...

The InterSystems DBMS has a built-in technology for working with non-structured data called iKnow and a full-text search technology called iFind. We decided to take a dive into both and make something useful. As the result, we have DocSearch — a web application for searching in InterSystems documentation using iKnow and iFind.

For IRIS 2019.1 and later, the documentation has a new look and feel. Check it out:

https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls
 

The underlying changes include a new style sheet and a complete rewrite of the code we use to generate HTML.  (There is now an underlying API for retrieving content as JSON, as well as a large set of unit tests -- for those of you who like that kind of thing!)

We have put a new modern and responsive UI design on top of our existing product documentation. It is available in a public beta here: http://docs.intersystems.com/beta/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.FramePage.cls

Please review the new design and give us your feedback.

Our company is in the process of converting our software for use in Intersystems IRIS and one of the major sections of the software makes use of a custom statically-linked C library using the $ZF("function-name") functionality. During this, I found out that the process for setting up the C library to be used within the database platform has changed significantly between Cache and IRIS.

I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

• Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
• Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
• Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

Previously I showed you how to run pButtons to start collecting performance metrics that we are looking at in this series of posts.

Hi, Community!

We are pleased to invite you to participate in the InterSystems Documentation Satisfaction survey. As part of ongoing efforts to make our content more usable and helpful, Learning Services wants your feedback about InterSystems documentation. The survey covers many different areas of documentation, and you can complete it in about five minutes. The deadline for responses is October 30. Also, responses are anonymous.                                                                                           

The survey is over, thanks!

Is there documentation in Portuguese?

Found a strange documentation block about Python bindings in Chapter 3.6 of the Caché manipulation functions with time and date. It looks like this text accidentally copied one to one of the Perl binging documentation.

Hi everyone! I was using the InterSystems Native API for Python and following the documentation I tried to use this method (https://irisdocs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/Python-Native/irisnative.iris.html#irisnative.iris.getAPIVersion after a while I realize that this method doesn't exist.

Hello!

I'm looking for information, suggestions, video (courses) on make a lot more use of the documatic system already built into Cache,

Probably talked of before within this forum, but after an hour or two of searching, can't find the articles that I mmay have seen before.

I want to do a lot more documenting of my installation, we use and actively comment classes and methods, but I want to take it further by actually documenting the "why" and high level "how" my system works. Documatic seems a good place to put that knowledge.