With the release of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, we're getting more frequent questions about how to establish secure connections over JDBC and other driver technologies. While we have nice summary and detailed documentation on the driver technologies themselves, our documentation does not go as far to describe individual client tools, such as our personal favourite DBeaver. In this article, we'll describe the steps to create a secure connection from DBeaver to your Cloud SQL deployment.

As you all know, the world of artificial intelligence is already here, and everyone wants to use it to their benefit.

There are many platforms that offer artificial intelligence services for free, by subscription or private ones. However, the one that stands out because of the amount of "noise" it made in the world of computing is Open AI, mainy thanks to its most renowned services: ChatGPT and DALL-E.

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.

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.

Have you ever been editing files in VS Code, but needed to check a global value or run a few ObjectScript commands? Now you can, with no setup required! If you have vscode-objectscript extension version 2.10.0 or later and are connected to InterSystems IRIS 2023.2 or later, you can now open a terminal connection to your server, regardless of where it's located.

There are three ways to open this new terminal:

Did you know that you can get JSON data directly from your SQL tables?

Let me introduce you to 2 useful SQL functions that are used to retrieve JSON data from SQL queries - JSON_ARRAY and JSON_OBJECT.
You can use those functions in the SELECT statement with other types of select items, and they can be specified in other locations where an SQL function can be used, such as in a WHERE clause

The JSON_ARRAY function takes a comma-separated list of expressions and returns a JSON array containing those values.

Introducing Django

Django is a web framework designed to develop servers and APIs, and deal with databases in a fast, scalable, and secure way. To assure that, Django provides tools not only to create the skeleton of the code but also to update it without worries. It allows developers to see changes almost live, correct mistakes with the debug tool, and treat security with ease.

To understand how Django works, let’s take a look at the image:

Hi community,

The aim of this article is to explain how to create messaging between IRIS and Microsoft Teams.

In my company, we wanted to monitor error messages, and we used the Ens.Alert class to redirect those error messages through a Business Operation that sent an email.
The problem was that we sent those error messages to a support account where there were many emails. We wanted something specific for a specific team.

So we investigated how to make these messages reach the development team directly and they could have, in real time, a notification of an error in our production.
In our company we use Microsoft Teams as a corporate tool, so we asked ourselves: How could we make these messages reach the IRIS development team?

Hibernate is the most popular framework to do ORM (Object Relational Mapping) projects. With Hibernate a software can use the main DBMS in the market, including the capability to change the database vendor any time, without source code impact. This is possible because the Hibernate supports dialects. Each database product has a different dialect that can be assigned into a configuration file. So, if a software is using Oracle and is looking to evolve to InterSystems IRIS, just change the configuration file with connection and dialect information.

1. IRIS RAG Demo

This demo showcases the powerful synergy between IRIS Vector Search and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), providing a cutting-edge approach to interacting with documents through a conversational interface. Utilizing InterSystems IRIS's newly introduced Vector Search capabilities, this application sets a new standard for retrieving and generating information based on a knowledge base.
The backend, crafted in Python and leveraging the prowess of IRIS and IoP, the LLM model is orca-mini and served by the ollama server.
The frontend is an chatbot written with Streamlit.

Hi, Community!

This article is an overview of SQLAlchemy, so let's begin!

SQLAlchemy is the Python SQL toolkit that serves as a bridge between your Python code and the relational database system of your choice. Created by Michael Bayer, it is currently available as an open-source library under the MIT License. SQLAlchemy supports a wide range of database systems, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server, making it versatile and adaptable to different project requirements.

The SQLAlchemy SQL Toolkit and Object Relational Mapper from a comprehensive set of tools for working with databases and Python. It has several distinct areas of functionality which you can use individually or in various combinations. The major components are illustrated below, with component dependencies organized into layers:

I was attempting to find a solution to grant clients anonymous access to certain API endpoints while securing others within my REST API. However, when defining a Web Application, you can only secure the entire application and not specific parts of it.

Effective documentation is a cornerstone of software development, aiding in code comprehension, maintenance, and collaboration. By harnessing the power of Doxygen and the ObjectScript filter I've created, you can generate rich static documentation from your source code. This approach does not require a running IRIS instance and thus is a good choice in situations when access to IRIS is not possible. Static documentation may be provided to end-users as-is, together with the source code.