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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In my previous article, we reviewed possible use-cases for macros, so let’s now proceed to a more comprehensive example of macros usability. In this article we will design and build a logging system.

Logging system

Logging system is a useful tool for monitoring the work of an application that saves a lot of time during debugging and monitoring. Our system would consist of two parts:

  • Storage class (for log records)
  • Set of macros that automatically add a new record to the log

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You probably have a similar experience.
The more I use Atelier the more I miss INSPECTOR that I had in Studio!

First for PROPERTIES that can inherit a variable number of Parameters beyond imagination.
take %XML.Adapter as the most obvious.
next:
Where to find all inherited methods that I eventually want to overload? Take %Persistent as example.

Or where or how can %OnBeforeAddToSaveSet() (the correct camel case) be overloaded ?

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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.

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Article
· Nov 11, 2017 3m read
Summary on Local Variable Scoping

This should be an overview over a subject that pops up over several places in online documentation mostly as remarks and never as dedicated chapter.

Once upon a time ... No it's not a fairy tale.
In the beginning of Caché (and before) you had your partition to run your code. Part of that partition was a space with all your local variables nicely sorted by %,A,..Z,a,...z

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Last week, we announced the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, our new and comprehensive platform for all your data endeavours, whether transactional, analytics or both. We've included many of the features our customers know and loved from Caché and Ensemble, but in this article we'll shed a little more light on one of the new capabilities of the platform: SQL Sharding, a powerful new feature in our scalability story.

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As IRIS was announced yesterday by Paul Grabscheid I would be highly interested to get in touch with it.

- How can we get qualified for a closer view ?
- Where can we get some (preliminary) description + documentation.
- Is there any FT available ?

I'm especially interested in the areas around included/embedded/attached JVM and SPARK .

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Last week saw the launch of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform in sunny California.

For the engaging eXPerience Labs (XP-Labs) training sessions, my first customer and favourite department (Learning Services), was working hard assisting and supporting us all behind the scene.

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Announcement
· Sep 12, 2017
InterSystems IRIS Data Platform

Modern businesses need new kinds of applications — ones that are smarter, faster, and can scale more quickly and cost-effectively to accommodate larger data sets, greater workloads, and more users.

With this in mind, we have unveiled InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, a complete, unified solution that provides a comprehensive and consistent set of capabilities spanning data management, interoperability, transaction processing, and analytics. It redefines high performance for application developers, systems integrators, and end-user organizations who develop and deploy data-rich and mission-critical solutions.

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In the previous parts (1, 2) we talked about globals as trees. In this article, we will look at them as sparse arrays.

A sparse array - is a type of array where most values assume an identical value.

In practice, you will often see sparse arrays so huge that there is no point in occupying memory with identical elements. Therefore, it makes sense to organize sparse arrays in such a way that memory is not wasted on storing duplicate values.

In some programming languages, sparse arrays are part of the language - for example, in J, MATLAB. In other languages, there are special libraries that let you use them. For C++, those would be Eigen and the like.

Globals are good candidates for implementing sparse arrays for the following reasons:

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Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Part 3. Appendix

InterSystems IRIS OAUTH classes explained

In the previous part of our series we have learned about configuring InterSystems IRIS to act as an OAUTH client as well as authorization and authentication server (by means of OpenID Connect). In this final part of our series we are going to describe classes implementing InterSystems IRIS OAuth 2.0 framework. We will also discuss use cases for selected methods of API classes.

The API classes implementing OAuth 2.0 can be separated into three different groups according to their purpose. All classes are implemented in %SYS namespace. Some of them are public (via % package), some not and should not be called by developers directly.

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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.

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I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

  • Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
  • Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
  • Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

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Hello.

The idea of this post is to introduce Frontier: An abstraction layer that allows Rapid REST development.

REQUIREMENTS:

Why?

Have you ever found yourself dealing with repetitive tasks like mounting objects, serializing them and eventually handling multiple errors for multiple cases? Frontier can boost your development by making you focus on what really matters: your application.

Frontier is made to stop you from WRITE'ing by instead forcing your methods to return values.
It's designed to make you code clean, and you'll see the why pretty soon.

This is the Part 1, where you'll learn he basics about how to work with Frontier. That means at the end of this part you should be capable of

creating GET requests without difficulties. Since this also serves as a way to introduce the framework, I'll be calling this part: Core concepts.

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Hi, Community!

This week we have two videos. Check all new videos on InterSystems Developers YouTube Channel:

1. What is InterSystems Cloud Manager?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/_JDb1bfhB5w
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This video provides an introduction to InterSystems Cloud Manager (ICM) and its capabilities.

2. Instant Gratification: Pick Your Cloud

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qwI9KBMZh94
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Learning Services Live Webinars are back!

At this year’s Global Summit, InterSystems debuted InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, a single, comprehensive product that provides capabilities spanning data management, interoperability, transaction processing, and analytics. InterSystems IRIS sets a new level of performance for the rapid development and deployment of data-rich and mission-critical applications. Now is your chance to learn more!

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This summer the Database Platforms department here at InterSystems tried out a new approach to our internship program. We hired 10 bright students from some of the top colleges in the US and gave them the autonomy to create their own projects which would show off some of the new features of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. The team consisting of Ruchi Asthana, Nathaniel Brennan, and Zhe “Lily” Wang used this opportunity to develop a smart review analysis engine, which they named Lumière. As they explain:

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Database systems have very specific backup requirements that in enterprise deployments require forethought and planning. For database systems, the operational goal of a backup solution is to create a copy of the data in a state that is equivalent to when application is shut down gracefully. Application consistent backups meet these requirements and Caché provides a set of APIs that facilitate the integration with external solutions to achieve this level of backup consistency.

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Recently viewed a demo on the new Dynamic Objects in InterSystems (we are still running 2016.1); together with the upcoming IRIS data platform I started thinking about possibilities of building dynamic databases. That is, I can imagine some projects were it might be really nice to store dynamic objects and then run sql queries on them without ever defining the fields of the dynamic objects (i.e. not at storage, but only if you run your sql query).

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