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#InterSystems IRIS

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InterSystems IRIS is a Complete Data Platform
InterSystems IRIS gives you everything you need to capture, share, understand, and act upon your organization’s most valuable asset – your data.
As a complete platform, InterSystems IRIS eliminates the need to integrate multiple development technologies. Applications require less code, fewer system resources, and less maintenance.

I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

  • Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
  • Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
  • Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

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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! 

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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:

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Hello.

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

REQUIREMENTS:

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.

Open Exchange app
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As IRIS was announced yesterday by Paul Grabscheid I would be highly interested to get in touch with it.

- How can we get qualified for a closer view ? 
- Where can we get some (preliminary) description + documentation.
- Is there any FT available ?

 I'm especially interested in the areas around included/embedded/attached JVM and SPARK .

 

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Article
Robert Cemper · Sep 2, 2017 2m read
SPOOL - the forgotten device

Hi all,

In recent discussions, answers, comments IO redirection (with the famous code) was quite often seen
as the ultimate solution. It is definitely strong stuff and you can not only log your output but also do
key-grabbing in input.

But I think for simple logging it's quite a significant overhead.
If you just need to get some text or dump your variables or objects then SPOOL should be sufficient for your needs.

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This post will show you an approach to size shared memory requirements for database applications running on InterSystems data platforms including global and routine buffers, gmheap, and locksize as well as some performance tips you should consider when configuring servers and when virtualizing Caché applications. As ever when I talk about Caché I mean all the data platform (Ensemble, HealthShare, iKnow and Caché).

A list of other posts in this series is here

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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.

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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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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.

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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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** Revised Feb-12, 2018

While this article is about InterSystems IRIS, it also applies to Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare distributions.

Introduction

Memory is managed in pages.  The default page size is 4KB on Linux systems.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Oracle Linux 6 introduced a method to provide an increased page size in 2MB or 1GB sizes depending on system configuration know as HugePages.

At first HugePages required to be assigned at boot time, and if not managed or calculated appropriately could result in wasted resources.  As a result various Linux distributions introduced Transparent HugePages with the 2.6.38 kernel as enabled by default.  This was meant as a means to automate creating, managing, and using HugePages.  Prior kernel versions may have this feature as well however may not be marked as [always] and potentially set to [madvise].  

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux memory management system that reduces the overhead of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) lookups on machines with large amounts of memory by using larger memory pages.  However in current Linux releases THP can only map individual process heap and stack space.

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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.

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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 of the 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 ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

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

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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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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.

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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

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Article
Murray Oldfield · Sep 30, 2016 1m read
ECP Magic

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

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++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).

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