#InterSystems IRIS

InterSystems is pleased to announce a new Developer Download site providing full kit versions of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition and InterSystems IRIS for Health Community Edition.   These are available free of charge for application development use.

You can download directly from the InterSystems Developer Community by selecting Download InterSystems IRIS.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

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.

ObjectScript has at least three ways of handling errors (status codes, exceptions, SQLCODE, etc.). Most of the system code uses statuses but exceptions are easier to handle for a number of reasons. Working with legacy code you spend some time translating between the different techniques. I use these snippets a lot for reference. Hopefully they're useful to others as well.

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.

InterSystems is pleased to announce that InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2018.1.0 is now released.

This press release was issued this morning.

InterSystems IRIS is a complete, unified data platform that makes it faster and easier to build real-time, data-rich applications.  It mirrors our design philosophy that software should be interoperable, reliable, intuitive, and scalable.

Hi everyone,

I am still learning the platform for a student project and have to do some streaming and data analysis next. Since for my case I have no "live api" I wanted to just stream json files and output the data as it comes in from the files. (basically to emulate a incoming data scenario)

So thanks to the documentation and community posts I have figured how to create a stream and read data from a JSON but since I'm also new to JSON I have some parsing problems. I don't know how to access subarrays/sub-objects via objectscript.

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.

Hi Developers!

Often when we develop some library, tool, package, whatever on InterSystems ObjectScript we have a question, how we deploy this package on the target machine?

Also, we often expect that some other libraries already installed, so our package depends on them, and often on some particular version of it.

When you code on javascript, python, etc the role of packages deployment with dependency management takes package manager.

So, I'm pleased to announce that InterSystems ObjectScript Package Manager available!

Hi, everyone!

I want to share a personal project that started with a simple request at work: 

Is it's possible to know how many Caché licenses we are using? 

Reading other articles here in the community, I found this excellent article by  David Loveluck 

A good writer is supposed to draw you in with the title and bury the answer somewhere in the article.  I suppose this makes me a bad writer – don’t think less of me, my whole feeling of self-worth comes from the opinions of internet strangers! 

$LIST string format and %DynamicArray and %DynamicObject classes

IRIS, and previously Cache, contain several different ways to create a sequence containing a mixture of data values.  A data sequence that has been available for many years is the $LIST string.  Another more recent data sequence is the %DynamicArray class, which along with the %DynamicObject class, is part of the IRIS support for JSON string representation.  These two sequences involve very different tradeoffs.

$LIST String Format

Hi Developers!

Want to participate again in the competition of creating open-source solutions using InterSystems IRIS Data Platform? 

Then we're pleased to announce the second InterSystems IRIS Online Programming Contest!

And the topic for this contest is InterSystems IRIS with REST API.

The contest will again last three weeks: April 13-May 3, 2020. 

Also, please join the InterSystems Contests Discord Channel to chat about contest and technology.