$LIST string format and %DynamicArray and %DynamicObject classes

IRIS, and previously Cache, contain several different ways to create a sequence containing a mixture of data values. A data sequence that has been available for many years is the $LIST string. Another more recent data sequence is the %DynamicArray class, which along with the %DynamicObject class, is part of the IRIS support for JSON string representation. These two sequences involve very different tradeoffs.

$LIST String Format

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Database systems have very specific backup requirements that in enterprise deployments require forethought and planning. For database systems, the operational goal of a backup solution is to create a copy of the data in a state that is equivalent to when application is shut down gracefully. Application consistent backups meet these requirements and Caché provides a set of APIs that facilitate the integration with external solutions to achieve this level of backup consistency.

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In an ever-changing world, companies must innovate to stay competitive. This ensures that they’ll make decisions with agility and safety, aiming for future results with greater accuracy.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools help companies make intelligent decisions instead of relying on trial and error. These intelligent decisions can make the difference between success and failure in the marketplace.
Microsoft Power BI is one of the industry’s leading business intelligence tools. With just a few clicks, Power BI makes it easy for managers and analysts to explore a company’s data. This is important because when data is easy to access and visualize, it’s much more like it’ll be used to make business decisions.


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Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a Container?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

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In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to Caché. The goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running.

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GraphQL is a standard for declaring data structures and methods of data access that serves as a middleware layer between the client and the server. If you’ve never heard about GraphQL, here is a couple of useful online resources: here, here and here.

In this article, I will tell you how you can use GraphQL in your projects based on InterSystems technologies.

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In this post I would like to talk about the syslog table. I will cover what it is, how you look at it, what the entries really are, and why it may be important to you. The syslog table can contain important diagnostic information. If your system is having any problems, it is important to understand how to look at this table and what information is contained there.

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Globals, these magic swords for storing data, have been around for a while, but not many people can use them efficiently or know about this super-weapon altogether.

If you use globals for tasks where they truly shine, the results may be amazing, either in terms of increased performance or dramatic simplification of the overall solution (1, 2).

Globals offer a special way of storing and processing data, which is completely different from SQL tables. They were first introduced in 1966 in the M(UMPS) programming language, which was initially used in medical databases. It is still used in the same way, but has also been adopted by some other industries where reliability and high performance are top priorities: finance, trading, etc.

Later M(UMPS) evolved into Caché ObjectScript (COS). COS was developed by InterSystems as a superset of M. The original language is still accepted by developers' community and alive in a few implementations. There are several signs of activity around the web: MUMPS Google group, Mumps User's group), effective ISO Standard, etc.

Modern global based DBMS supports transactions, journaling, replication, partitioning. It means that they can be used for building modern, reliable and fast distributed systems.

Globals do not restrict you to the boundaries of the relational model. They give you the freedom of creating data structures optimized for particular tasks. For many applications reasonable use of globals can be a real silver bullet offering speeds that developers of conventional relational applications can only dream of.

Globals as a method of storing data can be used in many modern programming languages, both high- and low-level. Therefore, this article will focus specifically on globals and not the language they once came from.

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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.

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Article
· Apr 5, 2022 4m read
Serializing Python objects in globals

Motivation

This project was thought of when I was thinking of how to let Python code deal naturally with the scalable storage and efficient retrieving mechanism given by IRIS globals, through Embedded Python.

My initial idea was to create a kind of Python dictionary implementation using globals, but soon I realized that I should deal with object abstraction first.

So, I started creating some Python classes that could wrap Python objects, storing and retrieving their data in globals, i.e., serializing and deserializing Python objects in IRIS globals.

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*** archived ***

The question has come up several times and I saw mixed answers and no quick example

My personal preference is using CPIPE device as you get back exactly the output you will get at the command line interface of your OS .
The tricky thing is to stop reading in time.
The example just displays what you normally see in your console.
it becomes useful if you look for things that you can't get from any $system.whatever()

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Article
· Nov 4, 2022 9m read
VIP in AWS

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in AWS, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

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Spring Boot is the most used Java framework to create REST API and microservices. It can be used to deploy web or executable web or desktop self-contained apps, where the application and another dependencies are packaged toghether. Springboot allows you do to a lot of functions, see:

Note: to learn about SpringBoot see official site - https://spring.io/quickstart

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Container Images

In this second post on containers fundamentals, we take a look at what container images are.

What is a container image?

A container image is merely a binary representation of a container.

A running container or simply a container is the runtime state of the related container image.

Please see the first post that explains what a container is.

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In the WRC, we frequently see customers contact us because their Web Gateway is unable to serve web pages. This article will explain a frequent reason why these errors can occur, and explain some tools which can be used to debug the problem. This explanation is focused on the Web Gateway serving InterSystems IRIS instances, but the same explanation should apply to the CSP Gateway serving Caché instances as well.

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InterSystems Data Platforms products allow you to export and import security settings in two different ways.

This article talks about those options:
- On the command line, using ^SECURITY
- Programmatically, using the Export and Import methods of classes in the Security package

Exporting settings on the command line (^SECURITY)

You can export everything or individual sections of the security settings.

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Hi Developers!

Many of you publish your InterSystems ObjectScript libraries on Open Exchange and Github.

But what do you do to ease the usage and collaboration to your project for developers?

In this article, I want to introduce the way how to introduce an easy way to launch and contribute to any ObjectScript project just by copying a standard set of files to your repository.

Let's go!

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There are many ways to generate excel files using Intersystems, some of them are ZEN reports, IRIS reports ( Logi reports or formally known as JReports), or we can use third party Java libraries, the possibilities are almost endless.

But, what if you want to create a simple spreadsheet with only Caché ObjectScript? (no third party applications)

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