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#Internal Tech Article Contest

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This group unites posts related to the Internal Technical Article Writing Contest.

>> More details about the current contest here. 

Here at InterSystems, we often deal with massive datasets of structured data. It’s not uncommon to see customers with tables spanning >100 fields and >1 billion rows, each table totaling hundred of GB of data. Now imagine joining two or three of these tables together, with a schema that wasn’t optimized for this specific use case. Just for fun, let’s say you have 10 years worth of EMR data from 20 different hospitals across your state, and you’ve been tasked with finding….

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SQL injection remains one of the most critical vulnerabilities in database-driven applications, allowing attackers to manipulate queries and potentially access or compromise sensitive data. In InterSystems IRIS, developers have access to both Dynamic SQL and Embedded SQL, each with distinct characteristics. Understanding how to use them securely is essential for preventing SQL injection.

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Article
· Dec 21, 2024 13m read
Taking up Collections in IRIS

Imagine you’re walking down the street on a nice summer’s day, and someone walks up to you and says “Hey, you work at InterSystems, right? I’ve been hearing more and more about InterSystems IRIS lately. I know IRIS has its own programing language called ObjectBook? or InstaScript? OK, I admit it, I know it’s called ObjectScript! I know IRIS also supports Python. I’m a Python developer, so that sounds great to me. But I’m also interested in ObjectScript. For example, Python and other languages support collections. Does ObjectScript support collections?”

You’d answer “Of course!”

And then your new friend might get excited and start firing off more questions:

  • How many kinds of collections does ObjectScript support?
  • Can ObjectScript use Python collections?
  • Can Python use ObjectScript collections?
  • Which collection is best?

How would you answer? Well, you don’t have to worry about answering. All you’d have to do is send your new friend the URL of this long page.

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When working with InterSystems IRIS, database developers and architects often face a critical decision: whether to use Dynamic SQL or Embedded SQL for querying and updating data. Both methods have their unique strengths and use cases, but understanding their performance implications is essential to making the right choice. Response time, a key metric in evaluating application performance, can vary significantly depending on the SQL approach used. Dynamic SQL offers flexibility, as queries can be constructed and executed at runtime, making it ideal for scenarios with unpredictable or highly variable query needs. Conversely, Embedded SQL emphasizes stability and efficiency by integrating SQL code directly into application logic, offering optimized response times for predefined query patterns.

In this article, I will explore the response times when using these two types of SQL and how they depend on different class structures and usage of parameters. So to do this, I'm going to use the following classes from the diagram:

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At hackathons that InterSystems participated and I supported, many students were asking how all their teammates could use the same IRIS database that they spun up in a container. I suggested using ngrok to expose their localhost IRIS and realized we don't have documentation on that. Hence, I thought this would be great to let more people knwo about this powerful technique for enhancing collaboration during development and testing.

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For 15 over years I have been playing with ways to speed up the way I use InterSystems systems and technology via AutoHotkey scripting. As a power keyboard user (I avoid my mouse when possible) I found it very helpful to set up hotkeys to get to my most frequently accessed systems and research utilities as quickly as possible. While I have used this approach for many years, this is the first time that I am introducing my approach and a customer-facing hotkey script to the D.C. and OEx...

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Migrating from Oracle, MSSQL, or other purely relational database systems to a multimodel InterSystems IRIS is a strategic decision that requires careful planning and execution. While this transition offers significant benefits, including enhanced performance, scalability, and support for modern architectures, it also comes with challenges. In this article I will highlight some of the considerations connected to coding to ensure a successful migration. I will leave everything connected to an actual migration of structures and data outside the scope of this article.


First, when you're considering migrating to a different database system, you need to understand your business logic, whether it's on the side of the application (application server) or the database server. Basically, where do you have your SQL statements that you will need to potentially rewrite?

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Over the past couple of months, I have been working on the SMART on FHIR EHR Launch to test the capabilities of IRIS for Health using two open-source apps from CSIRO: SMART-EHR-Launcher and SMART Forms App. This journey has been incredibly interesting, and I’m truly grateful for the opportunity to work on this task and explore more of IRIS for Health’s potential.

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This article presents a potential solution for semantic code search in TrakCare using IRIS Vector Search.

Here's a brief overview of results from the TrakCare Semantic code search for the query: "Validation before database object save".

  • Code Embedding model

There are numerous embedding models designed for sentences and paragraphs, but they are not ideal for code specific embeddings.

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Article
· Dec 13, 2024 7m read
An Overview of Database Degrade

Introduction

Hello! In this article, I will be discussing database degrade, a type of data integrity issue one can face when using IRIS. First, I will be going over a review of the structure of IRIS databases. I'll then discuss how database degrade can manifest and common causes of degrade issues. I'll then conclude with general tips we give our customers about how to prevent or prepare for database degrade issues.

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Regardless of whether an instance of IRIS is in the cloud or not, high availability and disaster recovery are always important considerations. While IKO already allows for the use of NodeSelectors to enforce the scheduling of IRISCluster nodes across multiple zones, multi-region k8s clusters are generally not recommended or even supported in the major CSP's managed Kubernetes solutions. However, when discussing HA and DR for IRIS, we may want to have an async member in a completely separate region, or even in a different cloud provider altogether.

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An extension “extends” or enhances a FHIR resource or a data element in a custom way. The extension can be added to the root of a resource, such as “Patient.ethnicity” in US Core profile, and they can be added to individual elements such as HumanName, Address or Identifier.

Did you know that you can also add an extension to a primitive data type?

Primitives usually store a single item and are the most basic element in FHIR. For example: "Keren", false, 1234, 12/08/2024 etc.

For example, the patient resources might look like this:

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One of the challenges of creating a DICOM message is how to implement putting data in the correct place. Part of it is by inserting the data in the specific DICOM tags, while the other is to insert binary data such as a picture - In this article I will explain both.

To create a DICOM message, you can either use the EnsLib.DICOM.File class (to create a DICOM file) or the EnsLib.DICOM.Document class (to create a message that can be sent to PACS directly). In either case, the SetValueAt method will allow you to add your data to the DICOM tags.

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I recently had to refresh my knowledge of the HealthShare EMPI module and since I've been tinkering with IRIS's vector storage and search functionalities for a while I just had to add 1 + 1.

For those of you who are not familiar with EMPI functionality here's a little introduction:

Enterprise Master Patient Index

In general, all EMPIs work in a very similar way, ingesting information, normalizing it and comparing it with the data already present in their system. Well, in the case of HealthShare's EMPI, this process is known as NICE:

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Article
· Dec 11, 2024 2m read
Minimum IRIS container footprint

Sometimes customers need a small IRIS instance to do something in the cloud and shut it down, or they need hundreds of containers (i.e. one per end user or one per interface) with small workloads. This exercise came about to see how small an IRIS instance could be. For this exercise we focused on what is the smallest amount of memory we can configure for an IRIS instance. Do you know all the parameters that affect the memory allocated by IRIS ?

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For my hundredth article on the Developer Community, I wanted to present something practical, so here's a comprehensive implementation of the GPG Interoperability Adapter for InterSystems IRIS.

Every so often, I would encounter a request for some GPG support, so I had several code samples written for a while, and I thought to combine all of them and add missing GPG functionality for a fairly complete coverage. That said, this Business Operation primarily covers data actions, skipping management actions such as key generation, export, and retrieval as they are usually one-off and performed manually anyways. However, this implementation does support key imports for obvious reasons. Well, let's get into it.

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