We were testing upgrades on our internal systems recently, and were initially surprised to see a change in some instances of SQL behavior. On further investigation, the changes make a lot of sense, and are easy to adapt to. But, to hopefully save you some time and provide additional information in case this is something you too find curious or interesting, we thought we would share our understanding of the changes and how we got around it to preserve previous behavior where desired.

Starting in IRIS version 2024.2.

Are you familiar with SQL databases, but not familiar with IRIS?  Then read on...

About a year ago I joined InterSystems, and that is how IRIS got on my radar.  I've been using databases for over 40 years—much of that time for database vendors—and assumed IRIS would be largely the same as the other databases I knew.

You may have noticed that to configure a mirror for InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect there is a special requirement. I wanted to go through it step by step in this article.

This assumes you have already configured the second failover member and confirmed a successful failover member status in the mirror monitor:

Step 1: Enable HS_Services user (on backup and primary) 

Step 2: Switch to Namespace HSSYS and go to Interoperability > Configure > Credentials.

Over time, while I was working with Interoperability on the IRIS Data Platform, I developed rules for organizing a project code into packages and classes. That is what is called a Naming Convention, usually. In this topic, I want to organize and share these rules. I hope it can be helpful for somebody.

Disclaimer: This guide is a good fit for Interoperability projects. When you have integrations, data flows, when you use IRIS for ETL processes, etc. Overall, when your code is combined with Productions.

Modules what a topic! We don't have this notion in ObjectScript, but it's a fundamental concept in Python. Let's discover it together.

What is a Module?

I see modules as an intermediate layer between classes and packages. Let see it by example.

A bad example :

# MyClass.py
class MyClass:
    def my_method(self):
        print("Hello from MyClass!")

When you try to use this class in another script, you would do:

# class_usage.py
from MyClass import MyClass # weird, right?

my_instance = MyClass()
my_instance.my_method()

Why this is a bad example?

We recently changed the 'UserID" property in a "User" class from type of %String to be %Library.Username. This is for better consistency across our codebase regarding MAXLEN limit.

%Library.Username is a system wrapper datatype which extends %String and has a MAXLEN of 160. This change should have minimal/no impact on code behavior. However, we found that some SQL query cannot return expected rows after the change. Query will return empty values even if the entry is in the table.

Hi! I've extended my demo repository, andreas5588/demo-dbs-iris, to make it easy to test the FOREIGN SERVER and FOREIGN TABLE features in IRIS.

To achieve this, I created a namespace called FEDERATION. The idea is as follows:

1. Set up JDBC connections for each namespace.
2. Create a FOREIGN SERVER within the FEDERATION namespace for each connection.
3. Define a FOREIGN TABLE a least for one table based on each foreign server.

The Script:  demo-dbs-iris/src/sql/02_create_foreign_server.sql

IRIS does not support executing SQL statements that combine tables from different namespaces.

During testing the added Multi-Namespace feature I met a challenge
that required intervention. This simple request created 1000 lines of output.

USER>do^rcc

• As for the verbose variant you my run a log on your terminal to keep the result in details
• though a real summary was still missing.

So I decided to append a very condensed statistic to the summary line

1206

This summary I attached to the end show how and where the
90000+ hits are distributed. 

It works with the ALL namespace selection also for single code types

enter search string [

try on Demo Server

Demo Server SMP

📜 Santa Tecla, verse 8: "Hover your mouse over the screen, and the sea of data will open a path before you!!"

Hello community, first of all, apologies if anyone was offended by the blasphemy 😔

Have you ever thought it would be interesting to have the source code separated from the database data? Perhaps you'd like to be able to back up your code without copying gigabytes of client data.

Context

The Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) is a simple calling convention for web servers to forward requests to web applications or frameworks written in the Python programming language. WSGI is a Python standard described in detail in PEP 3333.

🤔 Ok, great definition and what the point with iris ?

IRIS 2024.2+ has a new feature that allows you to run WSGI applications directly on IRIS. This feature is a great way to integrate IRIS with other Python frameworks and libraries.

Collision Theory Confirmed

Introduction

There is a Link Procedure Wizard option within the Management Portal (System > SQL >Wizards > Link Procedure) which I had reliability issues with so I decided to use this solution instead.

Problem

You need to query an external SQL database to use the response within a namespace. This guide is assuming that you already have a working stored procedure in SSMS although you could instead use a SQL block within the operation. Stored procedures in SSMS are preferred to maintain integrity, Embedded SQL can get very confusing if you have a complicated SQL statement.

Introduction

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free source code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It provides built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js. You can add extensions to provide support for numerous other languages including ObjectScript.

The InterSystems extensions enable you to use VS Code to connect to an InterSystems IRIS server and develop code in ObjectScript. The Visual Studio Code Documentation is an excellent resource on VS Code, so it is a good idea to be familiar with it.

I have been struggling with a docker run command that kept crashing, the error message was too generic to point me to the right direction.

Since the container is shut down after the failure, I was unable to login to it in order to figure out the problem.

I had to run the container in a way that I'll be able to log into it before it crashed, so I found the adding  -u false prevents the docker run command to run the iris session IRIS and the container stayed up and running.

K9s is a terminal-based UI (aka kubectl clown suit), to manage Kubernetes clusters that drastically simplifies navigating, observing, and managing your applications in K8s, including Custom Resources like the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO) and ArgoCD Applications. If you are about to take your CKD, CKA, or CKS, leave k9s well enough alone for awhile as the abstraction to kubectl will become the standard for navigating the cluster and you will undoubtedly become estranged to the extended flags of kubectl and bomb the exam.

Here is an ObjectScript snippet which lets to create database, namespace and a web application for InterSystems IRIS:

	set currentNS = $namespace
	
	zn "%SYS"
	
	write "Create DB ...",!
	set dbName="testDB"
 	set dbProperties("Directory") = "/InterSystems/IRIS/mgr/testDB"
 	set status=##Class(Config.Databases).Create(dbName,.dbProperties)
	write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
	write "DB """_dbName_""" was created!",!!
	
	
	write "Create namespace ...",!
	set nsName="testNS"
	//DB for globals
	set nsProperties("Globals") = dbName
	//DB for routines
	set nsProperties("Routines") = dbName
	set status=##Class(Config.Namespaces).Create(nsName,.nsProperties)
	write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
	write "Namespace """_nsName_""" was created!",!!
	
	
	write "Create web application ...",!
	set webName = "/csp/testApplication"
	set webProperties("NameSpace") = nsName
	set webProperties("Enabled") = $$$YES
	set webProperties("IsNameSpaceDefault") = $$$YES
	set webProperties("CSPZENEnabled") = $$$YES
	set webProperties("DeepSeeEnabled") = $$$YES
	set webProperties("AutheEnabled") = $$$AutheCache
	set status = ##class(Security.Applications).Create(webName, .webProperties)
	write:'status $system.Status.DisplayError(status)
	write "Web application """webName""" was created!",!
	
	zn currentNS

Hi Everyone,

Link to webinar recording: https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?id=623

Thank you for your interest in this webinar!

Please submit questions about the content of the webinar as comments below this article.

The webinar covers two topics: monitoring message activity and volume and monitoring disk space. I summarize and motivate the topics in the following two sections. The information in this webinar and post applies to the Ensemble, Health Connect, and HealthShare products. For simplicity, I am only going to refer to Ensemble in this post.

This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3^rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)

In this second part we plan to discuss the practical aspects of creating a package manager in general and their projection to the Caché database environment.