Hi colleagues!

Every day Johns Hopkins University publishes new data on coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic status.

I built a simple InterSystems IRIS Analytics dashboard using InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in docker deployed on GCP Kubernetes which shows key measures of the disease outbreak.

This dashboard is an example of how information from CSV could be analyzed with IRIS Analytics and deployed to GCP Kubernetes in a form of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.

Added the interactive map of the USA:

Introduction and Motivation

A unit of ObjectScript code (a ClassMethod, say) may produce a variety of unexpected side effects by interacting with parts of the system outside of its own scope and not properly cleaning up. As a non-exhaustive list, these include:

During the development of the Terminal Multi-Line Command Editor I discovered in my IRIS installation
a piece of software that I just can classify as a historic artifact. And it is still fully operational !!!

As it dates back to times before InterSystems was founded in 1978 you may understand my surprise.
I personally stepped into that environment in 1978 and used it then for daily work.

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

The base class Bmap.Person defines persons within an organization distributed
by various countries. All records are indexed by (Country, PersonalId).
this structure doesn't allow use of bitmaps.

So a wrapper class Bmap.PersonQ around the data eliminates the top level of
the index (Country) and isolates the PersonalId (%Integer, MINVAL=1).
We are ready to use a Bitmap index.

A few performance figures on 300010 generated records.
You see that Relative Cost are sometimes quite misleading.

base

The typical WHERE condition in SQL relates mostly to some content of the rows you work on.
So it needs to be calculated and checked for each row you access.
Differently (and that's why I named it STATIC) is a WHERE condition that is independent of the rows you access.

As you know in Caché / IRIS you have the possibility to define a property as Multidimensional as documented here:
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim
and the explanation of how to use it
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim_values

Though the access is quite comfortable (in traditional COS sense) there are 2 main restrictions that hurt:

#1) It is not saved to disk unless your application includes code to save it specifically.
#2) It cannot be stored in or exposed through SQL tables
there are some more
I'll show how to overcome these limits

I wanted to provide a heads up of an improvement in how we generate and call method code in IRIS 2023.1.

A class in IRIS is composed of two main runtime components:

Introduction

The common requirement in many applications is logging of data changes in a database - which data has changed, who changed them and when (audit logging). There are many articles about this question and there are different approaches on how to do that in Caché.

The offer of ZPM is growing daily and the short names and
acronyms of the offer are sometimes hard to understand and
also hard to type with my lazy fingers.

So I decided to have

• a listing with the descriptions from the repository,
• split in short junks to avoid backscroll,
• controlled forward / backward scrolling,
• the option to select my packages by number,
• to install or uninstall with limited typing.

It runs with do ^zpmshow

A snapshot from the screen:

Earlier I've written about command pipes.
This is the internal variant of a PIPE.

To make this more tangible and visible for you I prepared a small example
The scenario is to run a monitoring process that receives
input from an unknown number of sensors. (Could be Lab equipment or similar.)

A VIEW in SQL is basically a prepared SQL statement.
It has to be executed and assembled like any other SQL query.
MATERIALIZED VIEW means that the content is collected before hands and can be retrieved rather fast.
I saw the concept first with my favorite competitor named O* and they made a lot of noise about it.
{ favorite: because I could win every benchmark against them }

Hello everyone,
After some work with IRIS we want to share our ToolBox-4-Iris with you.

What is this about?

The ToolBox-4-Iris is an API for IRIS with a collection of handy and useful tools - features that are not available in IRIS, but greatly simplify application development. To save time and effort on the "typical tools" that every developer needs. This includes additional classes, individual methods or even more efficient macros, which are described in the respective packages.

Content

It is a classic Global Mapping exercise presenting ^SPOOL as Class / Table

Background

Device #2 named SPOOL dates back to the predecessors of Caché and IRIS
It was the first "%Stream" like option to buffer output before printing.
It is also the first and till today the most simple way of output redirection.

Solution

This is also an example of a mapped Global.
USE 2 redirects the output into the Global ^SPOOL