I joined InterSystems less than a year ago. Diving into ObjectScript and IRIS was exciting, but also full of small surprises that tripped me up at the beginning. In this article I collect the most common mistakes I, and many new colleagues, make, explain why they happen, and show concrete examples and practical fixes. My goal is to help other new developers save time and avoid the same bumps in the road.

1. Getting lost among system classes and where to start

Hi Community,

We’re excited to share a brand-new Instruqt tutorial: 

🧑‍🏫 RAG using InterSystems IRIS Vector Search

This hands-on lab walks you through building a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) AI chatbot powered by InterSystems IRIS Vector Search. You’ll see how vector search can be leveraged to deliver up-to-date and accurate responses, combining the strengths of IRIS with generative AI.

✨ Why try it?

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform is a comprehensive, multi-model, multi-workload data platform that is ideal for accommodating the challenging requirements of applications for the Internet of Things. It is a complete platform for developing, executing, and maintaining IoT applications in a single, consistent, unified environment. It features a distributed architecture to support massive data-ingest rates and data volumes, while providing the flexibility and durability of an enterprise-grade transactional multi-model database to ingest, process, and persist data from a wide range of devices in different formats. It features a complete set of integration, event-processing, and integrated analytics capabilities, including full SQL support and text processing, business process orchestration, and a standards-based development environment.

Connect to, ingest, and persist a wide range of disparate device data types and formats

The data types associated with IoT applications are often heterogeneous, as they may originate from various devices with diverse functions and manufactured by different vendors. The underlying data platform must be able to ingest and process a wide range of raw data types in their original formats. Many applications also require the data platform to persist all of the disparate source data to detect deviations from normal ranges, accommodate downstream ad hoc analytics, maintain regulatory compliance, and fulfill other purposes.

The default request class, Ens.Request is fine for our initial workflow.  

We want to define other workflows that will reuse the same BPL class.  These workflows would send messages inbound to the BPL as different request classes.

Is this possible or is it required that we send in a request class matching the context request class in the context tab?

Thank you

What are the best practices for choosing a shard key in InterSystems IRIS to ensure long-term scalability without needing major refactoring later?

Hey Community,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯ InterSystems Different by Design @ Ready 2025

One of the most common kinds of integration we are asked to do is emailing. One of the most typical email services our customers use is Microsoft’s Office 365. After setting up the right configuration on the Microsoft side, we can email from IRIS with two HTTP requests. By the end of this article, we will be able to send an email with an attachment through our Microsoft 365 service!

Hello Community

The InitialExpression keyword values does not to set default values for properties in classes that extend %CSP.Page, unlike in other class types such as %Persistent or %RegisteredObject, where it works as expected during object instantiation (typically via %New()).

1. Is %CSP.Page instantiated using %New() under the hood, or does it use a different initialization mechanism?
2. Are there specific limitations or behaviors in CSP pages that prevent InitialExpression from working as expected?

Thank you!

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review, just let me know.

Hey Community,

The InterSystems team recently held another monthly Developer Meetup in the AWS Boston office location in the Seaport, breaking our all-time attendance record with over 80 attendees! This meetup was our second time being hosted by our friends at AWS, and the venue was packed with folks excited to learn from our awesome speakers.

Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

• Does not support access mode "ReadWriteMany"
• Does not support being mounted on more than one pod at a time
• Does not support access across availability zones

Vanna.AI - Personalized AI InterSystems OMOP Agent

The utility returns the desired values from the text and display the multiple values if exists based on starting and ending string.

Class Test.Utility.FunctionSet Extends %RegisteredObject
{

/// W !,##class(Test.Utility.FunctionSet).ExtractValues("Some random text VALUE=12345; some other VALUE=2345; more text VALUE=345678;","VALUE=",";")
 

Building a Sensor Data Demo with Spring Boot and InterSystems IRIS

In the era of IoT and connected devices, sensor data is everywhere—tracking temperature in logistics, monitoring equipment performance, or recording environmental conditions. But capturing, storing, and analyzing this data in real time requires more than just hardware sensors.

Finishing my previous example for multiple IRIS instances, I tried
to compose a local single instance version.  The step from the external
Python app to a version using embedded Python seemed to be obvious.
This was a wrong assumption, as some Python libraries just refused installation
into my local Windows-based environment.

In this tutorial, I will discuss how can you connect your IRIS data platform to sql server db  .

Prereq: 

• Have ODBC driver installed in your device. You can download it from here: Download ODBC Driver for SQL Server - ODBC Driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn. 
• Have SQL Server and IRIS installed in your device
• Have SQL Server connection Authentication enabled in SQL server

Hi all,
I needed to pick up the username from a set of credentials configured for a business operation in an interop production, and it turned out to take a few steps, so I'm sharing my method here, in the dual hope that someone has an easier way to do it, or failing that, that it is useful to someone.
Best,
Otto

InterSystems FAQ rubric

One way to optimize query performance is to use query parallelism on a per-query or system-wide basis (a standard feature).

This is a technique for dividing the execution of a particular query among processors on a multi-processor system. The query optimizer will execute parallel processing only if there is a possibility of benefiting from parallel processing. Parallel processing is only applicable to SELECT statements.

Our vendor is developing an interface API on their end to capture HL7 data on a Server Port, and they require us to send a pre-defined HL7 Order message for testing every hour until the API is completely operational.

Is it possible to accomplish that in a Business Operation automatically without utilizing a service or process? The BO is a standard TCP/IP connection.

I'm manually sending the message again from the Operations right now. I do not have access to the System Operation to use the Task Manager feature.

Background

For a variety of reasons, users may wish to mount a persistent volume on two or more pods spanning multiple availability zones. One such use case is to make data stored outside of IRIS available to both mirror members in case of failover.

Unfortunately the built-in storage classes in most Kubernetes implementations (whether cloud or on-prem) do not provide this capability:

• Does not support access mode "ReadWriteMany"
• Does not support being mounted on more than one pod at a time
• Does not support access across availability zones

Hi,

My understanding that in IRIS  we create an Inbound Adapter that would act like a Broker (connecting to server X) then have an MQTT outbound adapter to receive those messages?

Is there a quick sample that we could user to show how to setup these two Adapters, I started with this but I couldn’t for example find EnsLib.MQTT.Adapter.Inbound

and I guess here where I can set Server X IP & port

Not familiar with MQTT, I appreciate if you could take through how to setup a MQTT inbound & outbound adaptes ?

Thanks

I am working on a tool that configures an instance to use a common default routine database across all custom Namespaces. For instances that already have distinct default routine databases for their Namespaces, this would involve a step of merging over all code from the current default routine databases to the new "super" routine database. This should be done in such a way that only merges contents in the default routine database (not mapped databases) and is able to detect/exclude contents that already exist in the target database.

Securing IRIS Integrations with Mutual TLS (mTLS): A Practical Guide

In today’s enterprise environments, secure communication between systems is not optional—it’s essential. Whether you're integrating InterSystems IRIS with cloud APIs, internal microservices, or third-party platforms, Mutual TLS (mTLS) offers a powerful way to ensure both ends of the connection are authenticated and encrypted.

This post walks through how to configure IRIS for mTLS and how to validate your certificates to avoid common pitfalls.

🔐 What is Mutual TLS (mTLS)?

Following on from JediSoft’s announcement of the general availability of JediSoft IRISsync®, I wanted to show how it can help prevent configuration drift and ensure your failover is always ready. 

When managing InterSystems IRIS production servers, even a minor configuration change can cause significant issues if it’s not replicated in your mirror environments. Often, these differences go unnoticed until your failover environment breaks.

This common, but critical, problem can lead to unexpected downtime at a vital moment and impact your business continuity.

Your Mission

Let's pretend for a moment that you're an international action spy who's dedicated your life to keeping the people of the world safe from danger. You recieve the following mission:

Good day, Agent IRIS,

We're sorry for interrupting your vacation in the Bahamas, but we just received word from our London agent that a "time bomb" is set to detonate in a highly populated area in Los Angeles. Our sources say that the "time bomb" is set to trigger at 3:14 PM this afternoon.

Hurry, the people are counting on you!

The Problem

Ready to elevate your Business Intelligence game?

We've got an engaging video, perfect for all skill levels.

Discover how to get started with IRIS BI, optimize cube performance, and drive analytics adoption. Plus, get a sneak peek at what's next!

These are the strategic plans of my example for the External Languages Contest 2025

We're excited to announce a new version release of the SQLTools VS Code extension. 

SQLTools connects VS Code users to the most commonly used databases using drivers, including InterSystems IRIS. With over 3.5 million downloads, it is helping users work with their data much more easily.

Hey Community,

We're excited to invite you to the next InterSystems UKI Tech Talk webinar: 

👉AI Vector Search Technology in InterSystems IRIS

⏱ Date & Time: Thursday, September 25, 2025 10:30-11:30 UK

Speakers:
👨‍🏫 @Saurav Gupta, Data Platform Team Leader, InterSystems
👨‍🏫 @Ruby Howard, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Hi Team,

I've basic learning in Ensemble. I want to create a code as per following request. Please help in clearing following questions

We have a business process-AA. In this business process, we have onRequest method, here after performing some logic, I have to call a method ProcessAAlogic.