Production Decomposition

Production Decomposition is a new configuration option added to the CCR Client Tools that instead of source controlling the Production class as a single item, considers it a composition of configuration items. This allows different users to edit these distinct items within a Production at the same time Historically, this has been a pain point with source controlling Productions as any work involving the Production class required a check out that prevented other users from making edits.

We've recently made available a new version of InterSystems IRIS in the Vector Search Early Access Program, featuring a new Approximate Nearest Neighbor index based upon the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) indexing algorithm. This addition allows for highly efficient, approximate nearest-neighbor searches over large vector datasets, dramatically improving query performance and scalability.

InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics version 2024.1.3 is now available from the InterSystems Software Distribution  page.  This release includes AtScale 2024.1.3, and an updated User Defined Aggregate Function (UDAF) file.  This release includes and the following new modeling and BI capabilities:

• Formatting of calculation output based on on the field input rather than just the format defined on the calculation.  This is particularly useful for calculations that can't have a standard output format, such as year-over-year growth in dollars, euros, or time.

Welcome to the Q3’2024 quarterly platforms update.  We have some news on the AIX front to encourage better security, along with our usual round of OS version updates. 

If you’re new to these updates, welcome!  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. 

Alert: Database Corruption with Multi-Volume Databases after Truncation

InterSystems has corrected a defect that can cause database corruption or <DISKHARD> errors with multi-volume databases under extremely rare circumstances. Only databases that have been truncated are at risk.

The defect exists in the following products and any InterSystems offerings based on them:

• InterSystems IRIS® – 2024.1, 2024.1.1, and 2024.2
• InterSystems IRIS® for Health – 2024.1, 2024.1.1, and 2024.2
• HealthShare® Health Connect – 2024.1, 2024.1.1, and 2024.

The first developer preview of InterSystems IRIS 2024.3 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2024.3 has been posted to the WRC developer preview site.  Containers can be found on our container registry and are tagged latest-preview.

This is a very early build in the release cycle and there aren’t any “highlight” worthy features that are complete.  They’ll start to arrive in future preview releases.

Initial documentation can be found at these links below.

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) versions 2.8.4.11 and 3.4.3.11 are now Generally Available.  These are the latest versions of the two long-term supported versions of IAM. These releases contain important fixes, and all customers are encouraged to upgrade.

Customers on IAM 3.0 or 3.2 are encouraged to upgrade to 3.4.3.11 as support for those versions will soon come to an end.

IAM is an API gateway between your InterSystems IRIS servers and applications, providing tools to effectively monitor, control, and govern HTTP-based traffic at scale.

The 2024.2 releases of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect are now Generally Available (GA).

RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS

2024.2 is a Continuous Delivery (CD) release. Many updates and enhancements have been added in this release:

Enhancing Developer Experience

• Studio removal - 2024.2 Windows installations do not include the Studio IDE, and upgrading an existing instance removes Studio from the instance’s bin directory. Developers who wish to keep using Studio should download the 2024.

The 2024.1.1 extended maintenance release of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect is now available. It provides bug fixes for the previous 2024.1.0 release.

You can find the detailed change lists / upgrade checklists on these pages:

• InterSystems IRIS
• InterSystems IRIS for Health
• HealthShare Health Connect

How to get the software

The software is available as both classic installation packages and container images.  For the complete list of available installers and container images, please refer to the Supported Platforms webpage.

InterSystems API Manager (IAM) versions 2.8.4.10 and 3.4.3.10 are now Generally Available.  These are the latest versions of the two long-term supported versions of IAM. These release contain important fixes and all customers are encouraged to upgrade.

Customers on IAM 3.0 or 3.2 are encouraged to upgrade to 3.4.3.10 as support for those versions will soon come to an end.

IAM is an API gateway between your InterSystems IRIS servers and applications, providing tools to effectively monitor, control, and govern HTTP-based traffic at scale.

As of October 15, 2024, support for Caché & Ensemble on MacOS will be Deprecated.

Caché & Ensemble 2018.1.9 will continue to be supported, however there will be no further maintenance releases for MacOS. This means Caché & Ensemble 2018.1.9 will be the final version of these products on MacOS. 

As a reminder, maintenance releases for Caché and Ensemble on the other supported platforms will come to an end on March 31, 2027.  More details on that can be found in last year’s announcement.

InterSystems Reports version 24.1 is now available from the InterSystems Software Distribution site in the Components section.  The software is labeled InterSystems Reports Designer and InterSystems Reports Server and is available for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux operating systems.  

This new release brings along some great enhancements from our partner, insightsoftware.  InterSystems Reports 24.1 is powered by Logi Report Version 24.

Red Hat Insights alerts now available for InterSystems IRIS

InterSystems and Red Hat are working together to add IRIS-specific alerts to Red Hat Insights. 

Red Hat Insights is a service to predict and recommend remediations for system risks in Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments.  Insights is free with nearly every RHEL, OpenShift, or Ansible subscription.  You can learn more about Insights at Red Hat’s site.

Swappiness Recommendation

The first recommendation “Apply swappiness recommendation for better performance of InterSystems IRIS” has been activated.

Note: this was originally posted on June 5, 2024 but presented as being posted on May 9, 2024 so this re-post fixes the date. 

Recent updates to the Intersystems Language Server introduce many significant enhancements aimed at improving developer experience and productivity. I'll talk about some of the key ones here, while the complete list, including numerous bug fixes, can be found in the Language Server's CHANGELOG.

Detailed descriptions for syntax errors

In the past, all syntax errors were reported simply as "Syntax error.

Beginning with the release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform 2022.3, InterSystems corrected the license enforcement mechanism to include REST and SOAP requests. Due to this change, environments with non-core-based licenses that use REST or SOAP may experience greater license utilization after upgrading. To determine if this advisory applies to your InterSystems license, follow the instructions in the FAQ linked below.

This table summarizes the enforcement:

Here’s our Q2’2024 quarterly platforms update.  If you’re new to these updates, welcome!  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. 

With that said, on to the update…

InterSystems IRIS Production Operating Systems and CPU Architectures

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Recent Changes
  
  • Red Hat threw a lifeline to customers struggling to upgrade from RHEL 7 by announcing 4 years of Extended Life Cycle Support starting July 1, 2024.

InterSystems is pleased to announce the general availability of:

• InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2024.1.0.267.2
• InterSystems IRIS for Health 2024.1.0.267.2
• HealthShare Health Connect 2024.1.0.267.2

This release adds support for the Ubuntu 24.04 operating system.  Ubuntu 24.04 includes Linux kernel 6.8, security improvements, along with installer and user interface improvements.  InterSystems IRIS IntegratedML is not yet available on Ubuntu 24.04.

Additionally, this release addresses two defects for all platforms:

• A fix for some SQL queries using “NOT %INLIST” returning incorrect results.

As most of you have heard already, InterSystems announced the deprecation of Studio with the release of IRIS 2023.2. A detailed deprecation plan was revealed in November, and we are now hitting the first milestone in that plan. Starting with 2024.2 preview kits, Windows kits will no longer contain Studio. This means that new installations using this kit will not install Studio, and upgrading an existing instance to version 2024.2 (or later) will remove Studio from the instance’s bin directory.

Developers who wish to keep using Studio simply need to download the 2024.

An updated developer preview of InterSystems IRIS 2024.2 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2024.2 has been posted to the WRC developer preview site.  This release contains a few noteworthy changes:

• Containers – we skipped containers for the previous preview, but we’re including them this time.  In a future preview, we’re planning to switch these to use the Ubuntu 24.04 base image.
• Ubuntu 24.04 support – this preview includes support for the brand-new Ubuntu 24.04 operating system.  We will be dropping support for Ubuntu 20.04 in a later preview.

Alert: SQL Query using “NOT %INLIST” fails to return results

InterSystems has corrected an issue that can cause a small number of SQL queries to return incorrect results.  See below for the specifics on impacted queries.

This issue exists in the listed versions of the following products:

• InterSystems IRIS® data platform
• InterSystems IRIS for Health™
• HealthShare® Health Connect

As well as:

• Other InterSystems products based on the above products.

Impacted versions:

• 2021.1.3, 2021.1.4
• 2022.1.3, 2022.1.4
• 2023.1.0, 2023.1.1, 2023.1.2, 2023.1.3
• 2024.1.

Maintenance Releases 2022.1.5 & 2023.1.4 of InterSystems IRIS, IRIS for Health, & HealthShare HealthConnect are now available

Two extended maintenance releases of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health, and HealthShare Health Connect are now available.

✅ 2022.1.5

Release 2022.1.5 provides bug fixes for any of the previous 2022.1.x releases.

You can find the detailed change lists & upgrade checklists on these pages:

• InterSystems IRIS
• InterSystems IRIS for Health
• HealthShare Health Connect

✅ 2023.1.4

Release 2023.1.4 provides bug fixes for any of the previous 2023.1.x releases.

The first developer preview of InterSystems IRIS 2024.2 and InterSystems IRIS for Health 2024.2 has been posted to the WRC developer preview site.  Containers are not available for this preview, but we’ll be sure to post them next time.

This is the earliest in the release cycle that we’ve ever posted a developer preview and there aren’t any “highlight” worthy features that are complete.  I’ll list them as they get closer to done in future preview releases.

Initial documentation can be found at these links below.

The 2024.1 release of InterSystems IRIS^® for Health^TM, and HealthShare^® Health Connect is now Generally Available (GA).

❗This announcement does not apply for InterSystems IRIS^®

Release Highlights

In this release, you can expect a host of exciting updates, including:

1. Support for Smart on FHIR 2.0.0
2. FHIR R4 object model generation
3. Improved performance of FHIR queries
4. Removal of the Private Web Server (PWS)
5. and more.

Please share your feedback through the Developer Community so we can build a better product together.

InterSystems has encountered a defect that causes some upgrades of HealthShare® Health Connect to fail. This only affects instances that are not licensed for the use of FHIR® and that have interoperability-enabled namespaces. Under these conditions, the upgrade fails with an <HSFHIRErr> error.

This defect only impacts upgrades to version 2024.1 of HealthShare Health Connect.

The affected version, 2024.1.0.263.0, has been removed from distribution.  A new Point Release is available:

InterSystems introduced this feature many years ago and a time when using Public Key Infrastructure was not yet widely used. Creating materials for use with Public Key Infrastructure is now widely available, and InterSystems is observing a decline in using the InterSystems PKI. In addition, investments would be required to securely use it. The IRIS PKI documentation stated for years:

The InterSystems PKI is for testing purposes only. Do not use it in a production setting.

As of today March 26, 2024, the InterSystems PKI is now deprecated.

Are you using HealthShare® Health Connect? You should know that starting with version 2024.1, a private web server (PWS) will no longer be included in installations.

It is recommended that you migrate to an external production-grade web server to ensure security. Benefits include:

• Only one web server is needed for all your instances.
• You can take charge of security by keeping your web server up to date—no need to wait for the next InterSystems release.

See how to migrate to an external web server (video series, 10m).

Learn more in this FAQ post in the Developer Community.

In evaluating an IBM Support notification, InterSystems has determined a potential impact for our customers. The notification in question is:

Memory Leak in std::string for programs built with xlclang++ 16.1.0 in the presence of the 17.1.1 libc++.a

This issue affects versions 2022.x and 2023.x of

• InterSystems IRIS® data platform
• InterSystems IRIS for Health™
• HealthShare® Health Connect

It also affects other InterSystems products based on the InterSystems IRIS family of products.

The 2024.1 release of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform is now Generally Available (GA).

Release Highlights

In this release, you can expect a host of exciting updates, including:

1. Using vectors in ObjectScript: A powerful capability for optimizing data manipulation.
2. Vector Search (experimental): A cutting-edge feature for efficient data retrieval.
3. Multi-Volume Database: Enhancing scalability and storage management.
4. FastOnline Backup (experimental): Streamlining backup processes.
5. Multiple Super Server Ports: Providing flexibility in network configuration.
6. and much more!

Given the number of new features in this release, InterSystems has decided to add this fifth preview as part of the 2024.1 developer preview program.  This extended developer preview release only includes InterSystems IRIS^® for Health^TM, and HealthShare^® Health Connect.

❗This announcement does not apply for InterSystems IRIS^®

Highlights

In this release, you can expect a host of exciting updates, including:

1. Support for Smart on FHIR 2.0.0
2. FHIR R4 object model generation
3. Improved performance of FHIR queries
4. Removal of the Private Web Server (PWS)
5. and more.

InterSystems announces its fourth preview, as part of the developer preview program for the 2024.1 release.  This release will include InterSystems IRIS^®,  InterSystems IRIS^® for Health^TM, and HealthShare^® Health Connect.

Highlights

Many updates and enhancements have been added in 2024.1 and there are also brand-new capabilities, such as Using vectors in ObjectScript,  Vector Search (experimental), Multi-Volume Database, the ability to use Fast Online Backup (experimental), and the introduction of Multiple Super Server Ports.