#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.


Apache Airflow is the leading open-source platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines and workflows using Python. Workflows are defined as code (DAGs), making them version-controlled, testable, and reusable. With a rich UI, 100+ built-in operators, dynamic task generation, and native support for cloud providers, Airflow powers ETL/ELT, ML pipelines, and batch jobs at companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Spotify.

Airflow Application Layout

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Time for another round of code golf!

Develop a function that performs a two-step encryption process on a given string:

  • First Step: Reverse Cipher

    • Reverse the entire input string.
    • Relocate the last character of the original string (now the first character of the reversed string) to the end.

  • Second Step: Alphabetic Index Binary Encoding

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Article
· Dec 3 28m read
Security in IRIS

Security is fundamental to enterprise application development. InterSystems IRIS provides a comprehensive security framework that protects data, controls access, and ensures compliance. This guide introduces essential security features for developers new to IRIS, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and practical implementation strategies.

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Modern SQL engines are enormously complex pieces of software. Even when they appear stable and mature, subtle bugs can hide in their optimizers, type systems, predicate evaluation, or execution layers. These bugs rarely announce themselves loudly. Instead, they quietly produce incorrect results, behave inconsistently, or fail abruptly under specific combinations of SQL constructs.

This is precisely why tools like SQLancer exist. SQLancer automatically generates SQL queries and uses logical “oracles” to detect when a database behaves incorrectly. It has revealed hundreds of real bugs in widely used systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB.

With this in mind, I attempted to bring SQLancer to InterSystems IRIS, starting with the NOREC oracle — a powerful method for detecting optimizer correctness issues. The journey, however, uncovered not just potential SQL correctness problems, but also a surprising number of driver-level and server-level failures that prevented SQLancer from running at full strength.

This article summarizes why SQLancer is important, how the NOREC oracle works, and what unexpected findings appeared while testing IRIS.

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The Power of Indexing in Database Tables

When working with databases, most developers understand the concept of an index and why it's used: to speed up data retrieval. But the real impact of indexing often becomes clear only when you compare scenarios with and without it.

Do you Know what Happens Without an Index?
Imagine a table with three columns: Name, Age, and MobileNumber.

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Article
· Dec 4 6m read
Sub-Table Security

InterSystems IRIS provides extensive configurable security options, yet many developers primarily use roles and resources to secure entire tables or routines. Today, we will delve deeper. We can also secure individual columns and rows separately, but these two mechanisms operate very differently. Let's begin with the columns.

Column Security

For testing and demonstration, we will keep our table structure concise and straightforward. We have a table called "Person" in the USER namespace that contains an ID column, a date of birth column (DOB), first name, and last name.

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Project Overview / Introduction

Developing and testing REST APIs in InterSystems IRIS often requires a significant amount of boilerplate code. While ObjectScript provides powerful tools for building APIs, writing consistent and repeatable tests can be time‑consuming. This is where IrisOASTestGen comes in.

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We are a group of interface analysts in a healthcare setting, running IRIS for Health 2024, having upgraded over time from an old ENSEMBLE environment. We have been working on a wish list of development goals, but are having trouble finding the correct, best practice method/path for getting to what we envision.

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In this final part of our introduction to Window Functions, we will explore the remaining functions that have not been covered yet. You will also discover performance tips and a practical guide to help you decide when (and when not) to use window functions effectively.

1. Offset and Positional Value Functions

Overview

These functions reference values are calculated from other rows relative to the current row, or they are extracted from the first, last, or nth values within a window.

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Hi noble developers!

Have a question/discussion. Sometimes, while developing, we'd need to connect VSCode directly to a remote server (e.g., stage one) for debugging purposes. And after change back to local one. And then to remote again.

How do you perform this switching in VSCode in a convenient way?

I have several settings.json files (settings_local, settings_remote) which I put to a main settings.json when I need to make VSCode to connect to switch the connection:

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I'm pleased to announce the publication of gj :: dataLoader, a new VS Code extension that simplifies the task of loading data from local CSV files into SQL tables on your InterSystems IRIS servers.

Here's an introductory video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XohVoW5rSy4
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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You probably know this situation:
Some time ago, you found a very special $ZU function for a very specific type of problem. Some kind of mystical formula. It became popular and was used by many developers throughout your code and across all your installations.

Several versions and updates later, you are informed by ISC that your mystical $ZU is deprecated and no longer supported. You are advised to replace it with a new $something().

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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Version Control
  3. Exporting Classes
  4. Exporting BI Analytics classes
  5. Exporting globals

Introduction.

In this article, we'll cover a quick start to Git development with the InterSystems Developer Community and version control practices when working with IRIS InterSystems. We'll cover scenarios where we need to export Interoperability classes, globals, and analytics elements such as cubes and dashboards. These scenarios encompass key version control practices with IRIS.

To get started, you'll need:

  1. Register and log in to GitHub
  2. Be a member of the intersystems-community organization on Git

Getting started with IRIS InterSystems is very simple!

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Hi developers!
Happy holidays!

In ObjectScript there is neat option to log errors - call Log() method of an exception intance, e.g.:

ClassMethod MyMethod() {

Try {

w 1/0

}

Catch e {

do e.Log() // logging error in the app log

write "the error happened: "_e.DisplayString()

}

}

Is there anything like that for Embedded Python? e.g:

ClassMethod MyMethod() [Language = python] {

 try:

   print(1/0)

 except ZeroDivisionError as e:

   // how can I log e into IRIS App Error Log here?

   print("Caught exception: " + str(e))

}

Any ideas?

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Article
· Dec 2 2m read
Use IRIS Load Data in VSCode

The Load Data utility it is an excellent tool to load data from CSV/TXT files into an IRIS SQL Table, but it is required send the target file to the IRIS server and write the Load Data sentence to ingest the file content. Now it is possible select a file in VSCode, set the table destination and submit the request. The vscode-load-data utility will send the file to the IRIS server and run the Load Data command to you! Very simple:

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Hi Developers!

Consider I have a persistent class derived from %Persistent and I want it to be derived from %JSON.Adaptor to enjoy all the JSON features.

Can I do it programmatically?

So, it'd be wonderful to have a method in some util class that makes it happen? Something like:

Do ClassUtil.AddAncestor("MyPackage.MyPersistentClass","%JSON.Adaptor")

Any ideas?

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Hello Community! As another great year comes to a close, I wanted to notify you about an upcoming change to the vscode-objectscript extension. In an effort to reduce the extension's footprint, simplify maintenance, and improve ease of use, InterSystems plans to remove some rarely-used configuration settings. Our telemetry tells us that these settings are changed from the default by fewer than 2% of users. However, before finalizing the removal I would like to give any users of these settings the opportunity to explain why a setting shouldn't be removed.

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Hello Developers! 👋
I’m excited to introduce IRIS IO Utility, my submission for the InterSystems "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025. This VS Code extension provides you an intuitive and powerful interface for importing and exporting data without leaving your IDE.

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Hello community!
I have a small challenge for you :)

One of customers is sending quite a lot of messages between interoperability components, which mix standard request content and streams representing serialized JSON objects. As these JSON streams can be quite long (but not too long, just couple hundreds of characters) they would appreciate if the JSON content of stream was displayed in a nice-to-read way, using syntax highlighting by message trace view.

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There's a pattern I've encountered several times where I need to use a temp file/folder and have it cleaned up at some point later.

The natural thing to do here is to follow the patterns from "Robust Error Handling and Cleanup in ObjectScript" with a try/catch/pseudo-finally or a registered object to manage cleanup in the destructor. %Stream.File* also has a "RemoveOnClose" property that you can set - but use with care, as you could accidentally remove an important file, and this flag gets reset by calls to %Save() so you'll need to set it back to 1 after doing that.

There's one tricky case, though - suppose you need the temp file to survive in an enclosing stack level. e.g.:

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InterSystems IRIS embedded vector search capabilities lets us search unstructured and semi-structured data. Data is converted to vectors (also called ‘embeddings’) and then stored and indexed in InterSystems IRIS for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), text analysis, recommendation engines, and other use cases.

This is a simple demo of IRIS being used as a vector database and similarity search on IRIS.

Prerequisites:

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Embeddedpy-bridge: A Toolkit for Embedded Python

Overview

Embedded Python is a game-changer for InterSystems IRIS, offering access to the vast Python ecosystem directly within the database. However, bridging the gap between ObjectScript and Python can sometimes feel like translating between two different worlds.

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It was encouraging to see more people building VS Code extensions for the recent contest. However I noticed that of of the three extensions requiring credentials with which to make their connections only mine, gj :: dataLoader, leverages the long-established and officially-supported InterSystems Server Manager extension to obtain the connection definitions and to handle credentials securely.

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