In a customer project I was asked how you can keep track of database changes: Who changed what at which date and time. Goal was to track insert, update and delete for both SQL and object access.

This is the table that I created to keep the Change Log:

Introduction

Not so long ago, I came across the idea of using Python Class Definition Syntax to create IRIS classes on the InterSystems Ideas Portal. It caught my attention since integrating as many syntaxes as possible gives visibility to InterSystems’s products for programmers with experience in many languages.

Following 2 local Webinars we had focused on VS Code ["Intro" and "Beyond Basics"; in Hebrew], I prepared for the participants some related links of relevant resources which we sent as a follow-up. Sharing them here as well for the benefit of the Community.
You are all of course welcome to add more useful resources.

Nowadays so much noise around LLM, AI, and so on. Vector databases are kind of a part of it, and already many different realizations for the support in the world outside of IRIS.

Why Vector?

• Similarity Search: Vectors allow for efficient similarity search, such as finding the most similar items or documents in a dataset. Traditional relational databases are designed for exact match searches, which are not suitable for tasks like image or text similarity search.
• Flexibility: Vector representations are versatile and can be derived from various data types, such as text (via embeddings like Word2Vec, BERT), images (via deep learning models), and more.
• Cross-Modal Searches: Vectors enable searching across different data modalities. For instance, given a vector representation of an image, one can search for similar images or related texts in a multimodal database.

And many other reasons.

So, for this pyhon contest, I decided to try to implement this support. And unfortunately I did not manage to finish it in time, below I'll explain why.

Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.
Today, we continue talking about Interoperability, specifically monitoring your Interoperability deployments. If you haven't yet, set up Alerting for all your Interoperability productions to get alerts about errors and production state in general.

Inactivity Timeout is a setting common to all Interoperability Business Hosts. A business host has an Inactive status after it has not received any messages within the number of seconds specified by the Inactivity Timeout field. The production Monitor Service periodically reviews the status of business services and business operations within the production and marks the item as Inactive if it has not done anything within the Inactivity Timeout period.
The default value is 0 (zero). If this setting is 0, the business host will never be marked Inactive, no matter how long it stands idle.

This is an extremely useful setting since it generates alerts, which, together with configured alerting, allows for real-time notifications about production issues. Business Host being idle means there might be some issues with production, integrations, or network connectivity worth looking into.
However, Business Host can have only one constant Inactivity Timeout setting, which might generate unnecessary alerts during known periods of low traffic: nights, weekends, holidays, etc.
In this article, I will outline several approaches towards dynamic Inactivity Timeout implementation. While I do provide a working example (currently running in production for one of our customers), this article is more of a guideline for building your own dynamic Inactivity Timeout implementation, so don't consider the proposed solution as the only alternative.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

On Linux, use the following steps to delete an instance of InterSystems IRIS (hereinafter referred to as IRIS).

(1) Stop the IRIS instance you want to uninstall using iris stop

# iris stop <instance name>

(2) Delete the instance information using the following command

Recently, I needed to run WebGateway on an additional port but with a twist - this port should publish only one web application.
At first, I thought about configuring Web Gateway to allow only specific web applications (~urls), but Web Gateway configuration is per Apache configuration:

Hello Community,

SQL language remains the most practical way to retrieve information stored in a database.

The JSON format is very often used in data exchange.

It is therefore common to seek to obtain data in JSON format from SQL queries.

Below you will find simple examples that can help you meet this need using ObjectScript and Python code.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

To enable Interoperability functionality after creating a namespace, use the EnableNamespace method of the %EnsembleMgr class:

do ##class(%EnsembleMgr).EnableNamespace()

We have a yummy dataset with recipes written by multiple Reddit users, however most of the information is free text as the title or description of a post. Let's find out how we can very easily load the dataset, extract some features and analyze it using features from OpenAI large language model within Embedded Python and the Langchain framework.

Hi, developers!

Currently, I'm working on a project that requires highly dynamic event management. In the context of the Java programming language, my first instinct should be to opt for the "Observer Pattern", which is an approach to managing interactions between objects by establishing a notification mechanism. It allows multiple observers to react to changes in the state of a subject autonomously, promoting code flexibility and modularity. If you are not familiar with this design pattern, check out Wikipedia to find more information about it.

While it's natural and commonly used in certain programming languages as Java and C++, in ObjectScript, it's quite a different story.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

If the system does not stop for 24 hours, old journal files will be deleted at 0:30 according to the "Journal file deletion settings".

A possible cause of journal files remaining that are older than the "Journal file deletion settings" is that there are transactions that remain open.

In that case, you will be able to delete the journal file by searching for processes executing transactions and finalizing the transactions.

The ideal number of table permissions to assign for your users is zero. Permissions should be granted upon sign-in based on the application used for access. For web applications, we have a simple way of doing this by appointing application roles, matching roles, and required resources in the System Management Portal.

ODBC and JDBC connections present a different problem, however, especially when third-party applications are involved. As providers of an ERP system, our customers often wish to be able to employ various software packages to integrate with or report on their data. Many of these programs are capable of running any kind of query. Yet, letting them do that can be devastating to a customer’s data.

So far, we have covered how to use ObjectScript to manage users, roles, resources, and applications. There are a few other classes in this package that work similarly to the ones mentioned above. However, these four classes are the ones everyone will have to use to manage their application security.