#InterSystems IRIS

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.

As a former JAVA developer it has always been a challenge to decide which database was the most suitable for the project we were going to develop, one of the main criteria I used was their performance, as well as their HA configuration capabilities ( high availability). Well, now is the time to put IRIS to the test with respect to some of the most commonly used databases, so I've decided to create a small Java project based on SpringBoot that connects via JDBC with a MySQL database, another of PostgreSQL and finally with IRIS.

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?

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.

Intro

If you ever wondered how to debug some requests that are being made to or from IRIS, well here is a little tutorial on how to do that.

During a complex project, usually you get the specifications and implement the communication between IRIS and other things based on that. But from the paper to the real world there's usually a huge gap and you need to know why you are receiving an error on a parameter, on a header, you are not receiving the data and so on.

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.

Nowadays, most applications are deployed on public cloud services. It brings many advantages including savings in human and material resources, the ability to grow quickly and cheaply, greater availability, reliability, elastic scalability, and options to improve the protection of digital assets. One of the most popular options is AWS. It allows us to deploy our applications usings virtual machines (EC2 service), Docker containers (ECS service), or Kubernetes (EKS service).

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Using the Config.Configuration class and SYS.Database class methods, you can create and register a namespace database from the terminal.

Below is a series of execution examples that create database file /CacheDB/AAA/cache.dat and register database AAA and namespace AAA in the configuration file (cache.cpf).
* Execute in the %SYS namespace. *

* Make sure that this script runs as the user that is used for all IRIS processes to ensure that the directory has appropriate ownership and permissions *

These days the vast majority of applications are deployed on public cloud services. There are multiple advantages, including the reduction in human and material resources needed, the ability to grow quickly and cheaply, greater availability, reliability, elastic scalability, and options to improve the protection of digital assets. One of the most favored options is the Google Cloud. It lets us deploy our applications using virtual machines (Compute Engine), Docker containers (Cloud Run), or Kubernetes (Kubernetes Engine). The first one does not use Docker.

Following one package from the last contest I met a strange problem.
There was the requirement to install jupyter-notebook
I work on Windows and there was some old Python installed
No big surprise: Installation of jupyter-notebook failed
Therefore, the latest version of Python was installed fast.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can use the system routine ^DBSIZE to estimate the backup file size (see also Note 1).

^DBSIZE estimates the file size of full, cumulative, and differential backups of the databases selected in the database backup list.

The database backup list is created from [System Administration] > [Configuration] > [Database Backup] > [Database Backup List] in the Management Portal.

Several steps should be done in order to secure the connection through xDBC clients to an IRIS Server instance using TLS. Most of the information can be obtained from the documentation about TLS on IRIS here, about configuring the security layer for encrypted connections. In the next paragraphs we will cover an step-by-step guide on how to configure and test the connection using SQL Clients apps using ODBC and JDBC.

Welcome, dear members of the community!

In this article we are going to demonstrate the great potential that IRIS/HealthConnect makes available to all its users with the use of Embedded Python and we are going to do it by developing a small production that will allow us to recognize and identify the faces present in a JPG file from some images that we will use as a reference.