Greetings dear community members!

Many of you will remember the NLP capabilities available in IRIS under the name iKnow, which were deprecated not long ago. But...is everything deprecated? NO! A small village resists deprecation: iFind indexes!

InterSystems IRIS 2025.2 introduces the IRISSECURITY database, the new home for security data. Unlike IRISSYS, the previous home for security data, IRISSECURITY can be encrypted, which secures your sensitive data at rest. In a future version, IRISSECURITY will be mirrorable.

This version also introduces the %SecurityAdministrator role for general security administration tasks.

Are you familiar with SQL databases, but not familiar with IRIS? Then read on...

About a year ago I joined InterSystems, and that is how IRIS got on my radar. I've been using databases for over 40 years—much of that time for database vendors—and assumed IRIS would be largely the same as the other databases I knew. However I was surprised to find that IRIS is in several ways quite unlike other databases, often much better. With this, my first article in the Dev Community, I'll give a high-level overview of IRIS for people that are already familiar with the other databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, Snowflake, PostgeSQL, etc. I hope I can make things clearer and simpler for you and save you some time getting started.

Let's start with a simple motivating question: over the past 14 days, what are my most common errors in the Application Error Log?

Faced with the enormous and evergrowing amounts of data being generated in the world today, software architects need to pay special attention to the scalability of their solutions. They must also design systems that can, when needed, handle many thousands of concurrent users. It’s not easy, but designing for massive scalability is an absolute necessity.

Software architects have several options for designing scalable systems. They can scale vertically by using bigger machines with dozens of cores. They can use data distribution (replication) techniques to scale horizontally for increasing numbers of users. And they can scale data volume horizontally through the use of a data partitioning strategy. In practice, software architects will employ several of these techniques, trading off hardware costs, code complexity, and ease of deployment to suit their particular needs.

This article will discuss how InterSystems IRIS Data Platform supports vertical scalability and horizontal scalability of both user and data volumes. It will outline several options for distributing and partitioning data and/or user volume, giving scenarios in which each option would be particularly useful. Finally, this paper will talk about how InterSystems IRIS helps simplify the configuration and provisioning of distributed systems.

Imagine you’re walking down the street on a nice summer’s day, and someone walks up to you and says “Hey, you work at InterSystems, right? I’ve been hearing more and more about InterSystems IRIS lately. I know IRIS has its own programing language called ObjectBook? or InstaScript? OK, I admit it, I know it’s called ObjectScript! I know IRIS also supports Python. I’m a Python developer, so that sounds great to me. But I’m also interested in ObjectScript. For example, Python and other languages support collections. Does ObjectScript support collections?”

You’d answer “Of course!”

And then your new friend might get excited and start firing off more questions:

• How many kinds of collections does ObjectScript support?
• Can ObjectScript use Python collections?
• Can Python use ObjectScript collections?
• Which collection is best?

How would you answer? Well, you don’t have to worry about answering. All you’d have to do is send your new friend the URL of this long page.

This article will introduce you to the concept of virtual environments in Python, which are essential for managing dependencies and isolating project from the OS.

What is a Virtual Environment?

A virtual environment is a folder that contains :

At hackathons that InterSystems participated and I supported, many students were asking how all their teammates could use the same IRIS database that they spun up in a container. I suggested using ngrok to expose their localhost IRIS and realized we don't have documentation on that. Hence, I thought this would be great to let more people knwo about this powerful technique for enhancing collaboration during development and testing.

Hello Community,

I'm currently planning a system upgrade from Caché (2018.1.8.766) to InterSystems IRIS (2024.1). The environment consists of one database server and three application servers connected via ECP.

Hello my friends,

I have a bit problem with date format, I need to display like this DD-MM-YYYY

I've put the objectscript like this : set DOB=$zd(paper.PAPERDob,15)

and the result is

Why It cannot show the full year, I mean why 99 or 95 why not 1999 or 1995 ?

Thank You

Best Regards,

Steven Henry

Now that we have a good understanding of Python and its features, let's explore how we can leverage Python within IRIS.

• Introduction to Python in IRIS
• Language Tag
  • How to use it?
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion
• Importing Python Modules (pypi modules)
  • How to use it
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion
• Importing Python Modules (custom modules)
  • How to use it
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Conclusion

This will be an introduction to Python programming in the context of IRIS.

Before anything I will cover an important topic: How python works, this will help you understand some issues and limitations you may encounter when working with Python in IRIS.

All the articles and examples can be found in this git repository: iris-python-article

The 2025.1.1 maintenance releases of InterSystems IRIS^® data platform, InterSystems IRIS^® for Health^TM, and HealthShare^® Health Connect are now Generally Available (GA). Please share your feedback through the Developer Community so we can build a better product together.

SQL injection remains one of the most critical vulnerabilities in database-driven applications, allowing attackers to manipulate queries and potentially access or compromise sensitive data. In InterSystems IRIS, developers have access to both Dynamic SQL and Embedded SQL, each with distinct characteristics. Understanding how to use them securely is essential for preventing SQL injection.