Hey Developers,

We'd like to invite you to join our next contest dedicated to creating useful tools to make your fellow developers' lives easier:

🏆 InterSystems Developer Tools Contest 🏆

Submit an application that helps to develop faster, contributes more qualitative code, and helps in testing, deployment, support, or monitoring of your solution with InterSystems IRIS.

Duration: January 23 - February 12, 2023

Prize pool: $13,500

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InterSystems supports use of the InterSystems IRIS Docker images it provides on Linux only. Rather than executing containers as native processes, as on Linux platforms, Docker for Windows creates a Linux VM running under Hyper-V, the Windows virtualizer, to host containers. These additional layers add complexity that prevents InterSystems from supporting Docker for Windows at this time.

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I bet that not everyone familiar with InterSystems Caché knows about Studio extensions for working with the source code. You can actually use the Studio to create your own type of source code, compile it into interpretable (INT) and object code, and sometimes even add code completion support. That is, theoretically, you can make the Studio support any programming language that will be executed by the DBMS just as well as Caché ObjectScript. In this article, I will give you a simple example of writing programs in Caché Studio using a language that resembles JavaScript. If you are interested, please read along.

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Are you all ready for something you wish you knew ages ago (or, in my case, a DECADE ago)? Open up a portal in your favorite instance and go to:

System Administration->Configuration->Additional Settings->Startup

Scroll down to "Terminal Prompt" and click 'Edit'. This allows you to edit what you see on your terminal prompt. You can change that to my current setting: 8,3,2

What does this do? It adds your instance name for your prompt. So now your prompt can look like:

DEVELOPMENT:USER>

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YASPE is the successor to YAPE (Yet Another pButtons Extractor). YASPE has been written from the ground up with many internal changes to allow easier maintenance and enhancements.

YASPE functions:

  • Parse and chart InterSystems Caché pButtons and InterSystems IRIS SystemPerformance files for quick performance analysis of Operating System and IRIS metrics.
  • Allow a deeper dive by creating ad-hoc charts and by creating charts combining the Operating System and IRIS metrics with the "Pretty Performance" option.
  • The "System Overview" option saves you from searching your SystemPerformance files for system details or common configuration options.

YASPE is written in Python and is available on GitHub as source code or for Docker containers at:


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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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Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a Container?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

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Over the past year or so, my team (Application Services at InterSystems - tasked with building and maintaining many of our internal applications, and providing tools and best practices for other departmental applications) has embarked on a journey toward building Angular/REST-based user interfaces to existing applications originally built using CSP and/or Zen. This has presented an interesting challenge that may be familiar to many of you - building out new REST APIs to existing data models and business logic.

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Working in support, I usually get asked how many days I should keep journals. Should it be two days or after two backups? More? Less? Why two?

The correct answer (for most of the environments) is that you should keep the journals since the last validated Backup. I.e., until you don't check if a Backup is valid (restoring the file and checking with the Integrity utility), you can't be sure there is a good copy of your data and can't purge the journals safely.

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Article
· Apr 4, 2020 1m read
Websocket Echo server IRIS

In Caché you had an example of a WebSocket Server in namespace SAMPLES
With IRIS the samples are gone and require additional installation effort.

So I refurbished the code with some useful additions:

  • independent of namespace
  • timeout control from client
  • readable communication log

This contains 2 classes:

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In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.

While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:

  • Writing code
  • REST-enabling it
  • Documenting it (as a REST API)

Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.

This is advantageous because:

  • You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
  • Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
  • Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
  • Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
  • Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec

Let's develop our API in a spec-first approach!

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This formation, accessible on my GitHub, will cover, in half a hour, how to read and write in csv and txt files, insert and get inside the IRIS database and a distant database using Postgres or how to use a FLASK API, all of that using the Interoperability framework using ONLY Python following the PEP8 convention.

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Article
· Mar 5, 2021 3m read
Using ECP across IRIS and Caché

Migration from Caché to IRIS can be quite a challenge if your code is grown over many years
and probably not so clean structured as you may like it. So you face the need to check your
migrated code against some reference data. A few samples might not be a problem,
but some hundred GB of data for testing might be.

A possible step could be to have your fresh code in IRIS but leave your huge datastore on Caché and connect both environments over ECP. I have created a demo project that gives you the opportunity to try this based on 2 Docker images with IRIS and with Caché connected over ECP.

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Article
· Aug 4, 2021 3m read
IRIS Mirror in the cloud (AWS)

I have been working on redesigning a Health Connect production which runs on a mirrored instance of Healthshare 2019. We were told to take advantage of containers. We got to work on IRIS 2020.1 and split the database part from the Interoperability part. We had the IRIS mirror running on EC2 instances and used containers to run IRIS interoperability application. Eventually we decided to run the data tier in containers as well.

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InterSystems Official
· Feb 15, 2023
InterSystems Supported Platforms Update Feb-2023

InterSystems Supported Platforms Update Feb-2023

Welcome to the very first Supported Platforms Update! We often get questions about recent and upcoming changes to the list of platforms and frameworks that are supported by the InterSystems IRIS data platform. This update aims to share recent changes as well as our best current knowledge on upcoming changes, but predicting the future is tricky business and this shouldn’t be considered a committed roadmap.

We’re planning to publish this kind of update approximately every 3 months and then re-evaluate in a year. If you find this update useful, let us know! We’d also appreciate suggestions for how to make it better.

With that said, on to the update…

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