Introduction

A REST API (Representational State Transfer) is an interface that allows different applications to communicate with each other through the HTTP protocol, using standard operations such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. REST APIs are widely used in software development to expose services accessible by other applications, enabling integration between different systems.

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Unlike the movie mentioned in the image (for those who don't know, Matrix, 1999), the choice between Dynamic SQL and Embedded SQL is not a choice between truth and fantasy, but it is still a decision to be made. Below, I will try to make your choice easier.

If your need is interactions between the client and the application (and consequently the database), Dynamic SQL may be more appropriate, as it "adapts" very easily to these query changes. However, this dynamism has a cost: with each new query, it is remodeled, which can have a higher cost to execute. Below is a simple example of a Python code snippet.

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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).

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Article
· Mar 3, 2024 5m read
How to send messages to Microsoft Teams

Hi community,

The aim of this article is to explain how to create messaging between IRIS and Microsoft Teams.

In my company, we wanted to monitor error messages, and we used the Ens.Alert class to redirect those error messages through a Business Operation that sent an email.
The problem was that we sent those error messages to a support account where there were many emails. We wanted something specific for a specific team.

So we investigated how to make these messages reach the development team directly and they could have, in real time, a notification of an error in our production.
In our company we use Microsoft Teams as a corporate tool, so we asked ourselves: How could we make these messages reach the IRIS development team?

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We all know that having a set of proper test data before deploying an application to production is crucial for ensuring its reliability and performance. It allows to simulate real-world scenarios and identify potential issues or bugs before they impact end-users. Moreover, testing with representative data sets allows to optimize performance, identify bottlenecks, and fine-tune algorithms or processes as needed. Ultimately, having a comprehensive set of test data helps to deliver a higher quality product, reducing the likelihood of post-production issues and enhancing the overall user experience.

In this article, let's look at how one can use generative AI, namely Gemini by Google, to generate (hopefully) meaningful data for the properties of multiple objects. To do this, I will use the RESTful service to generate data in a JSON format and then use the received data to create objects.

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The invention and popularization of Large Language Models (such as OpenAI's GPT-4) has launched a wave of innovative solutions that can leverage large volumes of unstructured data that was impractical or even impossible to process manually until recently.

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Article
· Feb 24, 2024 2m read
The bewitched line terminator

I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

  • CR+LF is typical for Windows
  • LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
  • CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

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Monitoring your IRIS deployment is crucial. With the deprecation of System Alert and Monitoring (SAM), a modern, scalable solution is necessary for real-time insights, early issue detection, and operational efficiency. This guide covers setting up Prometheus and Grafana in Kubernetes to monitor InterSystems IRIS effectively.

This guide assumes you already have an IRIS cluster deployed using the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO), which simplifies deployment, integration and mangement.

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Your application is deployed and everything is running fine. Great, hi-five! Then out of the blue the phone starts to ring off the hook – it’s users complaining that the application is sometimes ‘slow’. But what does that mean? Sometimes? What tools do you have and what statistics should you be looking at to find and resolve this slowness? Is your system infrastructure up to the task of the user load? What infrastructure design questions should you have asked before you went into production? How can you capacity plan for new hardware with confidence and without over-spec'ing? How can you stop the phone ringing? How could you have stopped it ringing in the first place?

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In the world of APIs, REST is very extended. But what happens when you need more flexibility in your data-fetching strategies? For instance letting the client to choose what fields is going to receive. Enter GraphQL, a query language for your APIs that provides a flexible alternative to REST.

In this post, we will:

  • Compare REST and GraphQL.
  • Dive into the basics of GraphQL: Queries, Mutations, and HTTP.
  • Build a simple GraphQL server implementation using Graphene, SQLAlchemy, and Flask over data in InterSystems IRIS.
  • Explore how to deploy your GraphQL server as a WSGI application in IRIS.
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Overview

We started to use Azure Service Bus (ASB) as an enterprise messaging solution 3 years ago. It is being used to publish and consume data between many applications in the organization. Since the data flow is complex, and one application’s data is usually needed in multi applications the “publisher” ---> ”multiple subscribers” model was a great fit. The ASB usage in the organization is dozens of millions of messages per day, while IRIS platform is having around 2-3 million messages/day.

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Article
· Mar 28, 2019 2m read
ObjectScript error handling snippets

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.

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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.

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Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

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Hello!

This article is a small overview of a tool that helps to understand classes and their structure inside the InterSystems products: from IRIS to Caché, Ensemble, HealthShare.

In short, it visualizes a class or an entire package, shows the relations between classes and provides all the possible information to developers and team leads without making them go to Studio and examine the code there.

If you are learning InterSystems products, reviewing projects a lot or just interested in something new in InterSystems Technology solutions — you are more than welcome to read the overview of ObjectScript Class Explorer!

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InterSystems Official
· Nov 8, 2022
ZPM is now InterSystems Package Manager (IPM)

I'm pleased to announce a milestone in the lifecycle of the ObjectScript package manager, ZPM. The package manager has offered developers the ability to neatly package up ObjectScript code and deployment configuration settings and version information in a convenient way. Over the last few years, it has evolved greatly into an integral part of many development workflows.

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