This should be an overview over a subject that pops up over several places in online documentation mostly as remarks and never as dedicated chapter.

Once upon a time ...  No it's not a fairy tale.
In the beginning of Caché (and before) you had your partition to run your code. Part of that partition was a space with all your local variables nicely sorted by %,A,..Z,a,...z

And whatever values or information you had to store locally was there and visible and available to any piece of code running  in your partition. No problem if you are team of developers working well together with complete doc

Learning Services Live Webinars are back! 

At this year’s Global Summit, InterSystems debuted InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, a single, comprehensive product that provides capabilities spanning data management, interoperability, transaction processing, and analytics. InterSystems IRIS sets a new level of performance for the rapid development and deployment of data-rich and mission-critical applications. Now is your chance to learn more! 

Joe Lichtenberg, Director of Product and Industry Marketing for InterSystems, presents "Introducing InterSystems IRIS Data Platform", a high-level descrip

Hi, Community!

See the Key Notes videos from Global Summit 2017 with new InterSystems IRIS Data Platform announcement.

• InterSystems Global Summit Keynote - Part 1
• InterSystems Global Summit Keynote - Part 2

As I mentioned in an early post the roots of COS were laid in the late 60ies of the 20th century.

Close to that time, BLISS was designed at Carnegie-Mellon University (January 15, 1970)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS
Similarly in 1972 C language was written at Bell Labs.
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Both were designed to overcome the portability limits of code written in assembly language.
While BLISS was running on DEC machines and vanished with Digital Equipment Corporation
C language and later C++ expanded on almost any processor technology until today.

Both had the n

Hi, Community! 

This week we have two videos. Check all new videos on InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

1. What is InterSystems Cloud Manager?

This video provides an introduction to InterSystems Cloud Manager (ICM) and its capabilities.

2. Instant Gratification: Pick Your Cloud

This summer the Database Platforms department here at InterSystems tried out a new approach to our internship program.  We hired 10 bright students from some of the top colleges in the US and gave them the autonomy to create their own projects which would show off some of the new features of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform.  The team consisting of Ruchi Asthana, Nathaniel Brennan, and Zhe “Lily” Wang used this opportunity to develop a smart review analysis engine, which they named Lumière.   As they explain:

A rapid increase in Internet users along with the growing power of online revie

Hello.
The idea of this post is to introduce Frontier: An abstraction layer that allows Rapid REST development.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Caché 2016.2 or higher.
• Frontier.

Why?

Have you ever found yourself dealing with repetitive tasks like mounting objects, serializing them and eventually handling multiple errors for multiple cases? Frontier can boost your development by making you focus on what really matters: your application.
 

Frontier is made to stop you from WRITE'ing by instead forcing your methods to return values.
It's designed to make you code clean, and you'll see the why pretty soon.

This is the Part 1, where you'll learn he basics about how to work with Frontier. That means at the end of this part you should be capable of 

creating GET requests without difficulties. Since this also serves as a way to introduce the framework, I'll be calling this part: Core concepts.

I worked through the Community for proposals to provide end users
in an easy way with data formatted as EXCEL sheet.

There is a great article Tips & Tricks - SQL to Excel

there's an important message embedded: "EXCEL can interpret HTML tables and display them as usual"

Where's the light weight export to EXCEL ?
Good old CSP is well equipped to produce HTML tables accepted from EXCEL as input.
With modern Browsers you don't even need <head>and  <body> tags.
So the required code around your SQL result set is really slim.
And you are free to add any formatting you need either by HTML or in SQL.

T

This post will guide you through the process of sizing shared memory requirements for database applications running on InterSystems data platforms. It will cover key aspects such as global and routine buffers, gmheap, and locksize, providing you with a comprehensive understanding. Additionally, it will offer performance tips for configuring servers and virtualizing IRIS applications. Please note that when I refer to IRIS, I include all the data platforms (Ensemble, HealthShare, iKnow, Caché, and IRIS).

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management.

I have written this post with an introdu

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.

Recently upper case ß was defined as an official character for German
how can this be adjusted in Caché 2017 ?

Beginning - see Part 1.

3. Variants of structures when using globals

A structure, such as an ordered tree, has various special cases. Let's take a look at those that have practical value for working with globals.

3.1 Special case 1. One node without branches

Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Part 3. Appendix

InterSystems IRIS OAUTH classes explained

In the previous part of our series we have learned about configuring InterSystems IRIS to act as an OAUTH client as well as authorization and authentication server (by means of OpenID Connect). In this final part of our series we are going to describe classes implementing InterSystems IRIS OAuth 2.0 framework. We will also discuss use cases for selected methods of API classes.

The API classes implementing OAuth 2.0 can be separated into three different groups according to their purpose. All classes are implemented in %SYS namespace. Some of them are public (via % package), some not and should not be called by developers directly.

NB. Please be advised that PKI is not intended to produce certificates for secure production systems. You should make alternate arrangements to create certificates for your productions.
NB. PKI is deprecated as of IRIS 2024.1: documentation and announcement.

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 wil

By default, Analyzer executes queries as components are added. Often, there are times where you may know exactly what you are looking to do, and you do not want Analyzer to execute 5 queries as you drag and drop items onto rows/columns and select your filters. This is where toggling Auto-execute off can help.

When an error occurs in your application, simply logging it might be enough. But for certain errors, you might want to send a notification to people right away. There are three ways to generate custom email notifications from InterSystems IRIS.

Is there a better way to iterate through all properties of an object than the following? Perhaps without needing to open a definition of the class but directly against the object?

SAMPLES>set t=##class(HoleFoods.Transaction).%OpenId(1)                          
SAMPLES>set def=##class(%Dictionary.ClassDefinition).%OpenId("HoleFoods.Transaction")
SAMPLES>for i=1:1:def.Properties.Count() {  w def.Properties.GetAt(i).Name_":"_$property(t,def.Properties.GetAt(i).Name),!  }
Actual:0
AmountOfSale:4.95
Channel:2
Comment:
DateOfSale:62373
Discount:0
Latitude:
Longitude:
Outlet:35@HoleFoo

One of the great availability and scaling features of Caché is Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). With consideration during application development distributed processing using ECP allows a scale out architecture for Caché applications. Application processing can scale to very high rates from a single application server to the processing power of up to 255 application servers with no application changes.

ECP was used widely for many years in TrakCare deployments I was involved in. A decade ago a 'big' x86 server from one of the major vendors might only have a total of eight cores. For larger dep

Index

This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added.

You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting.

• Part 1 - Getting started on the Journey, collecting metrics.
• Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected.
• Part 3 - Focus on CPU.
• Part 4 - Looking at memory.
• Part 5 - Monitoring with SNMP.
• Part 6 - Caché storage IO profile.
• Part 7 - ECP for performance, scalability and availability.
• Part 8 - Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning
• Part 9 - Caché VMware Best Practice Guide
• Part 10 - VM Backups and IRIS freeze/thaw scripts
• Part 11 - Virtualizing large databases - VMware cpu capacity planning

What is a core file? and When are they use­ful?

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.

Whether you are accessing DeepSee for the first time ever or you are configuring DeepSee on a new instance, there are two common issues that are encountered after clicking on the “DeepSee” option in the System Management Portal.

Issue #1: Architect/Analyzer is grayed out!

Issue #2: DeepSee must be enabled before use.

Issue #1: Architect/Analyzer is grayed out!

There are two common causes for this problem.

Cause 1 - License

Cause 2 - Security

The first common cause is that the license does not have these DeepSee options enabled. To confirm if these options are enabled, you can run the

A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel.

See: - Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected

pButtons compiles data it collects into a single html file to make it easier to send to WRC and review the collated data. However, especially for pButtons run over long collection times like 24 hours, some of the time based data like mgstat, vmstat et

I saw someone recently refer to ECP as magic. It certainly seems so, and there is a lot of very clever engineering to make it work. But the following sequence of diagrams is a simple view of how data is retrieved and used across a distributed architecture.

For more more on ECP including capacity planning follow this link: Data Platforms and Performance - Part 7 ECP for performance, scalability and availability

To start

• There are three globals on disk ^A, ^B and ^C.
• Global ^B equals "B"
• There is one Data server and two or more Application servers.
• The diagrams show the cache (global buffers) o

Date range queries going too slow for you?  SQL Performance got you down?  I have ANOTHER weird trick that SQL Developers don't want you to know!*

++Update: August 2, 2018

This article provides a reference architecture as a sample for providing robust performing and highly available applications based on InterSystems Technologies that are applicable to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare, TrakCare, and associated embedded technologies such as DeepSee, iKnow, Zen and Zen Mojo.

Azure has two different deployment models for creating and working with resources: Azure Classic and Azure Resource Manager. The information detailed in this article is based on the Azure Resource Manager model (ARM).

Post updated in August 2025 to include links to IRIS.

I have seen customer problems where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché or IRIS databases was causing intermittent application slowdowns and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché and IRIS components from your virus scanning.

Generally, virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT or IRIS.DAT database files and the InterSystems binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning *.DAT files and other InterSystems files such as journals and binaries, then system pe

Hi!

Want to share with you code snippet of try catch block I usually use in methods which should return %Status. 

{ 
 try {
  	$$$TOE(sc,StatusMethod())
 }
 catch e {
 	set sc=e.AsStatus()
 	do e.Log()
 }

Quit sc 
}

Here $$$TOE is a short form of $$$TROWONERROR macro.

Inside macro StatusMethod is any method you call which will return %Status value. This value will be placed into sc variable.

In case of sc contains error execution will be routed to try catch block. You can wrap any Status methods calls in your code if you need to catch the errors coming from them.

In try ca