Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)

Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale.
Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).

Globals, these magic swords for storing data, have been around for a while, but not many people can use them efficiently or know about this super-weapon altogether.

If you use globals for tasks where they truly shine, the results may be amazing, either in terms of increased performance or dramatic simplification of the overall solution (1, 2).

Globals offer a special way of storing and processing data, which is completely different from SQL tables. They were first introduced in 1966 in the M(UMPS) programming language, which was initially used in medical databases. It is still used in the same way, but has also been adopted by some other industries where reliability and high performance are top priorities: finance, trading, etc.

Later M(UMPS) evolved into Caché ObjectScript (COS). COS was developed by InterSystems as a superset of M. The original language is still accepted by developers' community and alive in a few implementations. There are several signs of activity around the web: MUMPS Google group, Mumps User's group), effective ISO Standard, etc.

Modern global based DBMS supports transactions, journaling, replication, partitioning. It means that they can be used for building modern, reliable and fast distributed systems.

Globals do not restrict you to the boundaries of the relational model. They give you the freedom of creating data structures optimized for particular tasks. For many applications reasonable use of globals can be a real silver bullet offering speeds that developers of conventional relational applications can only dream of.

Globals as a method of storing data can be used in many modern programming languages, both high- and low-level. Therefore, this article will focus specifically on globals and not the language they once came from.

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (4 of 3)

The forth in the trilogy, anyone a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan?

If you are looking to breathe new life into an old MUMPS application follow these steps to map your globals to classes and expose all that beautiful data to Objects and SQL.

If the above does not sound familiar to you please start at the beginning with the following:

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (1 of 3)

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (3 of 3)

If you are looking to breathe new life into an old MUMPS application follow these steps to map your globals to classes and expose all that beautiful data to Objects and SQL.

If the above does not sound familiar to you please start at the beginning with the following:

The Art of Mapping Globals 1

When I describe InterSystems IRIS to more technically-minded people, I always start with how it is a multimodel DBMS at its core.

In my opinion that is its main advantage (on the DBMS side). And the data is stored only once. You just choose the access API you want to use.

It's well-known that namespace global mapping helps us to write code independent on database storage details (Caché instance name, directory path). But sometimes we can face problems accessing an unsubscripted global which has subscript level mapping (SLM) defined. Most of such cases are evident and associated with administrative tasks that should be done on database level, but some of them can confuse even an experienced developer. Just to start:

My major interest is Working with Globals in Embedded Python.
So I checked the available official documentation.

#1 Introduction to Globals
an attempt of a generic description of what a global is. Pointing to

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:

I would like to introduce my new project for the Globals Contest. A very new view for the globals browser

Hi Community,


In this article, I will introduce Python Flask Web Framework. Together we will create a minimal web application to connect to IRIS and get data from it.

Below you can find the steps we will need to follow:

• Step 1 : Introduction to Python Flask Web Framework
• Step 2 : Installation of Flask module
• Step 3 : Creation of web application using Flask
• Step 4 : Use of HTML Templates
• Step 5 : Installation of IRIS Python Native module
• Step 6 : Establishment of a connection with IRIS
• Step 7 : Transferring data from IRIS to Flask and displaying it

So Let's start with step 1

Step1-Introduction to Python Flask Web Framework

Flask is a small and lightweight Python web framework that provides useful tools and features that make creating web applications in Python easier. It gives developers flexibility and is a more accessible framework for new developers since it allows to build a web application quickly using only a single Python file. Flask is also extensible and doesn’t requires a particular directory structure or complicated boilerplate code before getting started.

For more details please view Flask Documentations

In a previous exercise, I was able to show the power of Caché.
A medium-designed set of interdependent tables with some GB of data.
URLs cross reference over some million pages resulting in ~3 billion records

Competition was between

• Caché
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL

Criteria were Speed + Storage consumption
I composed a customized loader fed over a "raw" TCP connection
Mapping the "objects" into the final table by directly writing to Global Storage.,

InterSystems IRIS currently limits classes to 999 properties.

But what to do if you need to store more data per object?

This article would answer this question (with the additional cameo of Community Python Gateway and how you can transfer wide datasets into Python).

The answer is very simple actually - InterSystems IRIS currently limits classes to 999 properties, but not to 999 primitives. The property in InterSystems IRIS can be an object with 999 properties and so on - the limit can be easily disregarded.

In the prior part of this series we have provided introduction to Google MapReduce approach, but still not covered their possible ObjectScript implementation. Which we will start to explain today.

Hi developers!

As you probably noticed in IRIS 2021 the names of globals are random.

And if you create IRIS classes with DDL and want to be sure what global was created you probably would want to provide a name.

And indeed you can do it.

Use WITH %CLASSPARAMETER DEFAULTGLOBAL='^GLobalName' in CREATE Table to make it work. Documentation. See the example below: