#InterSystems IRIS

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InterSystems IRIS is a Complete Data Platform
InterSystems IRIS gives you everything you need to capture, share, understand, and act upon your organization’s most valuable asset – your data.
As a complete platform, InterSystems IRIS eliminates the need to integrate multiple development technologies. Applications require less code, fewer system resources, and less maintenance.

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Question Patrick Fleming · 6 hr ago

Hello everyone,

I am new to InterSystems IRIS and would like to know which resources you recommend for beginners.

I have already explored some of the documentation, but I would appreciate suggestions for tutorials, videos, training courses, or hands-on exercises that helped you learn the platform.

What learning path would you recommend for someone just getting started?

Thank you in advance for your advice.

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Question Norman W. Freeman · 45 min ago

I would like to create a generic error handler defined somewhere in a class (or if not possible a routine that calls a class). 
This should not be page specific but for the whole app (as I have lots of CSP pages inside a legacy app). Obvisouly this will not be a single try catch block but rather something setup at system level (or web application level if not possible). The same way it's possible to handle sessions in a global way (by having aclass that inherit from %CSP.SessionEvents).

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Article Johannes Heikkonen · 1 hr ago 1m read

Hi everyone, 

I created a short demo and reference repository showing how to configure Auth0 as an OAuth provider for an InterSystems IRIS FHIR server, and how to call protected FHIR resources from a Python Flask application. 

The links below include a video walkthrough and a github repo with the sample application used in the video 

Links 

Video walkthrough

GitHub repository: https://github.com/MarshyKid/iris-fhir-oauth-demo

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Question Joshua Wigley · Jun 9

Hey All!

I wanted to reach out and get some advice on the best way to interact with a external SQL database, as I'm finding the documentation quite confusing to follow. I'm new to using SQL within InterSystem, and I want to make sure I'm following the best practices.

In essence, what I am trying to achieve, is extracting certain values from a HL7 message and then insert those message field values into an external database. The ODBC, DSN and Credentials details are all setup and working correctly.

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Question Patrick Fleming · 12 hr ago

 Hello Community,

I am learning more about InterSystems IRIS administration and would like to understand the recommended approach for monitoring performance in a production environment.

What tools, metrics, or dashboards do you typically use to monitor system health, database activity, and application performance?

I am particularly interested in learning which indicators are most useful for identifying potential bottlenecks before they affect users.

Thank you for sharing your experience and recommendations.

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InterSystems Official Bob Kuszewski · 13 hr ago

We released the x64_64 Ubuntu 26.04 build back on May 21st.  At the time we said that we were holding off on releasing ARM support due to come occasional network problems we found in testing.  We've worked with Ubuntu to resolve those issues - a bug in a vendor's network driver - and are pleased to say...

 InterSystems announces the general availability of:

  • InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2026.1.0.237.3
  • InterSystems IRIS for Health 2026.1.0.237.3
  • HealthShare Health Connect 2026.1.0.237.3

This release adds support for the Ubuntu 26.04 operating system for both ARM and x86_64 processors

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Question Don Martin · Sep 5, 2025

We have a task that runs objectscript code to load data into a linked external table.  After upgrading from 2024.1 to 2025.1, the load is throwing an error, with error code -400, and no error message.  The data DOES get loaded into the external table in its entirety, so with no meaningful error message, its hard to determine what the issue is.  The result is the same with and without the USING clause, so don't let that confuse you.

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Article Robert Cemper · Oct 14, 2025 3m read

To better understand Streams in IRIS I'll start with a short

History

In the beginning (before IRIS), there was just basic access to external devices.
The 4 commands OPEN, CLOSE, READ, WRITE still work and are documented 
by  Introduction to I/O in detail.
Especially for files, this is a direct access to your actual file system.
You have to take care of any status or other signal in your code.  
Also, any code conversion or similar is up to you. 

Class %Library.File aka %File offers a large collection of methods and queries 
for standard operations on directories and files.

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Question Tani Frankel · Feb 1, 2024

Is it possible to authenticate an xDBC (ODBC/JDBC) connection to InterSystems IRIS via (a 3rd party) OAuth server?

For REST APIs this is possible, but could this be achieved with OAuth? 

Out-of-the-box the ODBC/JDBC Drivers don't seem to have this option, but maybe some custom code could enable this? perhaps via Delegated Authentication and some OAuth classes customization, or some other way?

Has anyone done this already and can share how it was implemented, or someone with some guideline suggestions?

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Discussion Evgeny Shvarov · Jun 5

Hi folks!

Suppose a new version of your amazing software solution built on IRIS needs some persistence change: some data needs to be converted, some classes get new properties or even renamed, and some data should be prepopulated for newly introduced persistent classes to keep the whole application data consistent.

What are your approaches? 

SQL-based scripts? ObjectScript, or Python? for both directions of migration, up and down? 

Do you autogenerate it with Claude/Codex? What about data-consistency tests?

COuld you please share your thoughts? or libraries?

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Article Jonathan Card · May 28 5m read

There seems to be a generous use of ClassMethods in ObjectScript code generally. I hope my own experiences aren't representative, but I bet they are. Forgive me for giving away the ending of this article, but in short: don't use them. Unless you can make a pretty convincing case that you have to, just never use them.1

What is a ClassMethod? In an ObjectScript class, you can define methods in two different ways: in a Method, you must instantiate an instance of the class to call the method, and in a ClassMethod, you can call the method without instantiating the class. Of course, in a ClassMethod, you don't have access to any properties of the object (because there's no object), but you can access globals (they are global, after all) and Parameters (which are class constants).

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Article José Pereira · May 19 13m read

Abstract

Common Table Expressions (CTEs) provide a structured framework for defining reusable intermediate result sets within SQL statements. InterSystems IRIS implements CTEs via the WITH clause, enabling clearer query composition and modular analytical processing while remaining fully integrated with the IRIS cost-based optimizer.

This article explores the semantics of CTEs in InterSystems IRIS, explains their interaction with query optimization, discusses appropriate deployment scenarios, and presents executable examples illustrating practical patterns for production environments.


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Article Carlos Eduardo Dias Duarte · Jun 8 5m read

When I started building Smart Discharge Navigator, I faced a common challenge: FHIR data is stored as JSON bundles, but the analysis I needed required joining multiple resources together, the kind of thing SQL was built for.

InterSystems FHIR SQL Builder solved this completely. Instead of parsing JSON bundles in application code, I was able to write plain SQL directly against FHIR resource projections inside IRIS for Health. This article shows exactly how I used it to build the population-level readmission risk scoring engine at the heart of the application.


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Article Ben Schlanger · Jun 8 4m read

Back when I was a Developer Support Engineer in the InterSystems Worldwide Response Center (WRC), I would occasionally receive cases involving large message backlogs in a production. The customer would discover that a subset of queued messages were no longer useful and would ask a question similar to the following:

Is there an established best practice for mass-aborting messages in a specific component's queue that match a particular set of criteria?
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Article José Pereira · Jun 8 20m read

An AI agent reads the FHIR patient record before the consultation, asks the right questions based on what it already knows, detects critical red flags, and writes its findings back — so the physician arrives prepared.

This project was inspired in the suggested task #10 (Conversational FHIR Triage Assistant) for the InterSystems Programming Contest: AI Agents for FHIR


Healthcare Pain Points Addressed

Before a patient walks into a consultation room, a critical failure has already occurred: nobody read their medical history. The physician has 15 minutes.

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Article Pietro Di Leo · Oct 9, 2025 6m read

Introduction

In my previous article, I introduced the FHIR Data Explorer, a proof-of-concept application that connects InterSystems IRIS, Python, and Ollama to enable semantic search and visualization over healthcare data in FHIR format, a project currently participating in the InterSystems External Language Contest.

In this follow-up, we’ll see how I integrated Ollama for generating patient history summaries directly from structured FHIR data stored in IRIS, using lightweight local language models (LLMs) such as Llama 3.2:1B or Gemma 2:2B.

The goal was to build a completely local AI pipeline that can extract, format, and narrate patient histories while keeping data private and under full control.

All patient data used in this demo comes from FHIR bundles, which were parsed and loaded into IRIS via the IRIStool module. This approach makes it straightforward to query, transform, and vectorize healthcare data using familiar pandas operations in Python. If you’re curious about how I built this integration, check out my previous article Building a FHIR Vector Repository with InterSystems IRIS and Python through the IRIStool module.

Both IRIStool and FHIR Data Explorer are available on the InterSystems Open Exchange — and part of my contest submissions. If you find them useful, please consider voting for them!

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Article Robert Cemper · Aug 26, 2017 3m read

This is a  rather personal view of the history before Caché.
It is in no sense meant to compete with the excellent books from Mike Kadow discussed in an earlier article.
We have different histories and so this is meant to create a different perspective of the past.

The whole story started in 1966 at MGH (Mass.General Hospital) on a PDP-7 Ser.#103
with 8K of memory (18-bit words) [today = 18K byte ]  as a spare system.

"Serial Number 103 - was located in the basement of the now demolished Thayer Building,
currently [2014] the site of the Cox Cancer Center at MGH.

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Article Kate Lau · Oct 13, 2025 5m read

Hi all,

It's me again 😁. In the pervious article Writing a REST api service for exporting the generated FHIR bundle in JSON, we actually generated a resource DocumentReference, with the content data encoded in Base64

Question!! Is it possible to write a REST service for decoding it? Because I am very curious what is the message data talking about🤔🤔🤔

OK, Let's start!

1. Create a new utility class datagen.utli.decodefhirjson.cls for decoding the data inside the DocumentReference
 

ClassExtends%RegisteredObject

2. Write a Python function decodebase64docref to 
a. loop through the FHIR bundle
b.

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Article Geet Kalra · Jun 2 3m read

In the previous article, we used pyprod to create production components while relying on the UI for production configuration. That same production can now be defined entirely in Python:

from intersystems_pyprod import Production, ServiceItem, ProcessItem, OperationItem

iris_package_name = "HelloWorld"

class MyProduction(Production):
    services = [
        ServiceItem(
            "MyServiceName",
            "HelloWorld.MyService",
            host_settings={"target": "MyProcessName"},
        )
    ]
    processes = [
        ProcessItem(
            "MyProcessName",
            "HelloWorld.MyProcess",
            host_settings={"target": "MyOperationName"},
        )
    ]
    operations = [
        OperationItem("MyOperationName", "HelloWorld.MyOperation")
    ]
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Article Bruno Santos · Mar 19 8m read

The problem

How many times have we migrated an IRIS Instance to another machine, maybe even another version, and after a few days realized we forgot that one SSL Configuration critical for a Business Operations to work? Or maybe a credential, or a lonely class in a package by itself?

The solution

The simple solution is to make a checklist¹. A checklist of the entities we have to move. But simple checklists on Word documents are often forgotten, or just ignored.

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Article Kate Lau · Oct 9, 2025 5m read

Hi,

It's me again😁, recently I am working on generating some fake patient data for testing purpose with the help of Chat-GPT by using Python. And, at the same time I would like to share my learning curve.😑

1st of all for building a custom REST api service is easy by extending the %CSP.REST

Creating a REST Service Manually

Let's Start !😂

1. Create a class datagen.restservice which extends  %CSP.REST

ClassExtends%CSP.REST

2. Add a function genpatientcsv() to generate the patient data, and package it into csv string

ExtendsAs

you may test the function in the terminal by typing

3. Add a function 

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Question Hamras T · Jun 1

Hi all,

I'm working on a DICOM router in InterSystems IRIS, based on the workshop-iris-dicom-interop (https://github.com/intersystems-ib/workshop-iris-dicom-interop) example on GitHub. I'm using EnsLib.DICOM.Process to route incoming images to different PACS destinations, where the target system is decided at runtime via a database lookup.

I've run into two issues I'd love some guidance on:

1. Dynamically changing the destination without disrupting transactions

Right now, if I want to send to a new PACS target, I'd need to add a new Business Operation and call

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