#Ensemble

Introduction

The lack of visibility across data silos — data sources that are not integrated with enterprise systems — is a threat to business efficiency and profits in many industries. In financial services, front-office silos may develop where operations are segregated by product and region without coordination on data model design. Mergers and acquisitions may result in additional disparate silos, or regulations may require that data in one arm of the firm be inaccessible to another.

Introduction

This document is intended to provide a survey of various High Availability (HA) strategies that can be used in conjunction with InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare Foundation. This document also provides an overview of the various types of system outages that can occur, as well as how each strategy would handle a given outage, with the goal of helping you choose the right strategy for your specific deployment.

Executive Summary

InterSystems HealthShareÆ and InterSystems EnsembleÆ both provide a rapid integration and development platform with built-in capabilities for the high-speed processing of HL7 messages. For the purposes of HL7 v2 message routing the two products are equivalent in performance. For brevity, this document will just say Ensemble in many places but it should be taken to apply equally to both products.

We have recently completed a performance and scalability benchmark of Ensemble version 2015.1, focusing on HL7 version 2 messaging.

Ensemble is based on message flow, and a data transformation is a way to convert from one message type to another. DTL (Data Transformation Language) adds a layer to this - it provides a graphical way to do the conversion. This is really helpful because most of the time, people with domain-specific knowledge may not have extensive coding skills. However, you always have the ability to do some coding, so if you need or want to, this is available.

DTL has several components: the data transformation engine, the language itself, and the DTL editor.

An introduction to virtual documents

Ensemble virtual documents enable your productions to work with large and complex documents with little overhead.

What is a virtual document?

A virtual document is a special kind of Ensemble message, for use with Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) messages and with XML documents.

How are virtual documents different from standard messages?

The body of any Ensemble message is represented by a persistent class that has one property for each value that the message is intended to carry.

The Business Processing Language - for orchestration and long-running business processes.

Ensemble can orchestrate calls to external systems. Very often this is done to implement or automate a long-running business process - that is, real business processes where people interact with a series of different systems to complete complex tasks. BPL (the Business Processing Language) provides a graphical way to create these orchestrations.

How do you balance the need to achieve an early success with SOA against the requirement for an architecture that will deliver long term success? You don't want to get bogged down in architectural committees for three years, but you don't want to make short term decisions that will be roadblocks to long term success.

If your first project is to deploy a small number of reusable services in a matter of months but you know that four years from now you might have hundreds of services, an enterprise SOA infrastructure and specialized governance technology you have a dilemma.

Introduction

Application integration at its simplest is often just one application sending a message to another to notify it of some change. Perhaps when a patient arrives at a hospital, the registration system will send a message to clinical systems so they have all demographic data ready to use. Of perhaps it is just a nightly file transfer from the sales system to the accounting system.

But modern application integration platforms or suites can do a lot more than this to help applications work together and add real value to the enterprise.

Are you new to Ensemble? InterSystems provides several tools to learn the basics of Ensemble and get on your way to becoming an expert in the technology. Before installing Ensemble, take a look at the Ensemble Technology Overview and Getting Started with Ensemble in documentation. Respectively, these documents explain features and major components of Ensemble as well as how to install the software.

Introduction

HL7 V2 message routing solutions often have hundreds of business services, processes and operations. Inevitably things will go wrong and you have to monitor the production to be able to react quickly and resolve any problems before they can become serious issues.

Ensemble includes some powerful alerting capabilities that can help, but if you aren't careful you will be inundated with alerts and your inbox more or less becomes a copy of the event log defeating the object of the exercise.

Introduction

This paper describes how Ensemble behaves after a system crash or similar uncontrolled shutdown or failover. Ensemble is normally configured to start processing messages automatically when the operating system restarts or when the system has failed over to a cluster member or mirror member. No manual intervention is required. But, in order for your system to robustly handle system failure and restart, you must understand how Ensemble handles these conditions and develop your productions using the rules and guidelines in this document.