#JDBC

Problems with Strings

I am accessing IRIS databases with JDBC (or ODBC) using Python. I want to fetch the data into a pandas dataframe to manipulate the data and create charts from it. I ran into a problem with string handling while using JDBC. This post is to help if anyone else has the same issues. Or, if there is an easier way to solve this, let me know in the comments!

I am using OSX, so I am unsure how unique my problem is. I am using Jupyter Notebooks, although the code would generally be the same if you used any other Python program or framework.

Not sure there are many that connect to MS SQL to execute queries, stored procedures, etc, but our Healthsystem has many different MS SQL based databases we use within the Interoperability environment for various reasons.

With the push to moving from on-prem to the Cloud we ran into some difficulties with our SQL Gateway connections and knowing how to config them to use Microsoft Entra for Active Directory Authentication.

If you're migrating from Oracle to InterSystems IRIS—like many of my customers—you may run into Oracle-specific SQL patterns that need translation.

Take this example:

SELECT (TO_DATE('2023-05-12','YYYY-MM-DD') - LEVEL + 1) AS gap_date
FROM dual
CONNECT BY LEVEL <= (TO_DATE('2023-05-12','YYYY-MM-DD') - TO_DATE('2023-05-02','YYYY-MM-DD') + 1);

In Oracle: