Recently I needed to restore a version of a production class, which was overwritten by compilation and running UpdateProduction. As the correct version was unavailable in the source control, I used journals to restore the data. Journals store a plethora of information about what's happening in the system and are quite a powerful tool. This article explains how to work with journals to extract the data you require.

I'm proud to announce the new release of iris-pex-embedded-python (v2.3.1) with a new command line interface.

This command line is called iop for Interoperability On Python.

First I would like to present in few words the project the main changes since the version 1.

A breif history of the project

Version 1.0 was a proof of concept to show how the interoperability framework of IRIS can be used with a python first approach while remaining compatible with any existing ObjectScript code.

What does it mean? It means that any python developer can use the IRIS interoperability framework without any knowledge of ObjectScript.

Example :

from grongier.pex import BusinessOperation

class MyBusinessOperation(BusinessOperation):

    def on_message(self, request):
        self.log.info("Received request")

Great, isn't it?

We are looking at what we need to do to migrate from our current usage of Zen reports to InterSystems Reports. One of the hurdles for us is figuring out ways to interact with InterSystems reports programmatically from ObjectScript routines. There is a Java API for it, but it is possible to generate a report from InterSystems reports to a stream object in ObjectScript without diving into Java by using a %Net.HttpRequest. Here is a code example, followed by an explanation:

Sometimes we need to know for sure if the current environment has sufficient cores, memory, and bandwidth to support the planned number of users and such SLAs as latency, response time, and availability. This is true for databases and backends. This is why it is mandatory for critical applications and databases to simulate the users simultaneous/concurrent requests and collect metrics about performance and availability.

How many times do we find ourselves rebuilding, copy-pasting, adapting, Business Operations that make calls to REST services, and only adapting one or another part of the final code. This is annoying a lot. To resolve this our inconvenience, I present to you Interopway REST, a set of classes (a micro framework) that allows us to just add Business Operation to Production and use it.

I am often asked to review customers' IRIS application performance data to understand if system resources are under or over-provisioned.

This recent example is interesting because it involves an application that has done a "lift and shift" migration of a large IRIS database application to the Cloud. AWS, in this case.

A key takeaway is that once you move to the Cloud, resources can be right-sized over time as needed. You do not have to buy and provision on-premises infrastructure for many years in the future that you expect to grow into.

Continuous monitoring is required. Your application transaction rate will change as your business changes, the application use or the application itself changes. This will change the system resource requirements. Planners should also consider seasonal peaks in activity. Of course, an advantage of the Cloud is resources can be scaled up or down as needed.

For more background information, there are several in-depth posts on AWS and IRIS in the community. A search for "AWS reference" is an excellent place to start. I have also added some helpful links at the end of this post.

AWS services are like Lego blocks, different sizes and shapes can be combined. I have ignored networking, security, and standing up a VPC for this post. I have focused on two of the Lego block components;
- Compute requirements.
- Storage requirements.

This is an article on the InterSystems FAQ site.

1. Export API

a. Use $system.OBJ.Export() to specify individual routines to export. For example:

The format to specify is routine name.extension, and the extension is mac, bas, int, inc, obj.

Errors during export are stored in errors.

Methods written in ObjectScript can use pass-by-reference arguments to return information to the caller. Python doesn’t support pass-by-reference arguments, so Embedded Python in IRIS doesn’t support them either. That's it, that's the end of the post, hope you liked it. 😉 But wait, what about the Classic Rock & Roll?

When developing interoperability productions, it might be useful to have settings outside of a Business Host. The primary reason is when you need a setting to affect several different Business Hosts and want to guarantee that the value is the same. While System Default Settings can be used to propagate settings for Business Hosts, they can be changed by overriding the value on a BH level (although the advantage of Business Host settings set via SDS is that they don't need custom code which our current approach requires).
Another reason is when you need to affect non-setting parts of the Business Host configuration (PoolSize, Enabled, etc.)

We will be adding an env setting to a production.

In this article, I will show you how one can easily create and read Microsoft Word documents using InterSystems IRIS with the leverage power of embedded Python.

Setup

First things first, let’s install the Python module called python-docx. There are a lot of modules to write MS Word files in Python. However, this one is the easiest one to use.

Just execute the following command on the terminal:

Here we are again with an article related to the Mirror!

In the previous article we saw how we could configure a Mirror between two IRIS instances, one acting as an active node and the other as a passive one. This mirroring system works on the transfer of a journal file that keeps the instance that works as a passive node continuously updated, but what happens if due to some communication failure or permissions of the journal file it is not transferred correctly?

Hi Developers!

Often solutions with InterSystems IRIS BI can turn into a quite big solution with dozens of pivots and dashboards.

With every new IRIS BI solution release we can add changes that could influence the behavior of existing pivots or dashboards so they stop working. For example if we change the dimension or measure name, forget deploying some cubes or subject areas, conduct refactoring via mass renaming of cubes and its elements etc some widgets could stop functioning.

Hi folks!

Just want to introduce you a new util to import CSV into IRIS - csvgenpy!

Install

USER>zpm "install csvgenpy"

Use:

do ##class(shvarov.csvgenpy.csv).Generate("file or url","table","schema")

Example:

During my repeated testing with Docker Desktop, I'm often short on disk space
nd need to clean it over and over as described earlier.
The main reason is the rather uncontrolled growth of ext4.vhdx
that is located on my C: drive by default.
So I decided to move this file to a large external disk.