A good writer is supposed to draw you in with the title and bury the answer somewhere in the article. I suppose this makes me a bad writer – don’t think less of me, my whole feeling of self-worth comes from the opinions of internet strangers!

Continuing on with providing some examples of various storage technologies and their performance profiles, this time we looked at the growing trend of leveraging internal commodity-based server storage, specifically the new HPE Cloudline 3150 Gen10 AMD processor-based single socket servers with two 3.2TB Samsung PM1725a NVMe drives.

Here is a snippet that I learned yesterday

You can define an index on a collection property but when I tried to use it, I failed. I was using

     Select ….. where …. :xx %INLIST collproperty

But this will not use an index, but the equivalent syntax

     SELECT .. WHERE ... FOR SOME %ELEMENT(collproperty) (%VALUE=:xx)

will use the index

Check out

http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...

APM normally focuses on the activity of the application but gathering information about system usage gives you important background information that helps understand and manage the performance of your application so I am including the IRIS History Monitor in this series.

In this article I will briefly describe how you start the IRIS or Caché History Monitor to build a record of the system level activity to go with the application activity and performance information you gather. I will also give examples of SQL to access the information.

In this short article we talk about how to get Yape running in a docker container to avoid having to setup python on your machine.

It's been a while since the last article in this series, so let's recap quickly.

Quotes (1NF/2NF/3NF)^ru:

Every row-and-column intersection contains exactly one value from the applicable domain (and nothing else).
The same value can be atomic or non-atomic depending on the purpose of this value. For example, “4286” can be

• atomic, if its denotes “a credit card’s PIN code” (if it’s broken down or reshuffled, it is of no use any longer)
• non-atomic, if it’s just a “sequence of numbers” (the value still makes sense if broken down into several parts or reshuffled)

This article explores the standard methods of increasing the performance of SQL queries involving the following types of fields: string, date, simple list (in the $LB format), "list of <...>" and "array of <...>".

Sometimes, it comes in very handy (especially for the EAV model) to use array properties in a class and be able to qickly search by their elements: both the key and the value.

Let’s take a look at a simple example:

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.

It's almost time to get your customers upgraded to new versions - are you worried about showing off your SQL Performance after upgrades? If you want to upgrade without worrying, then I have just the program for you!!! Check out this video from Global Summit 2016 featuring yours truly explaining how to upgrade a system without worrying about pesky SQL queries showing on your waistline!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfFPYfIoR_g

In last week's discussion we created a simple graph based on the data input from one file. Now, as we all know, sometimes we have multiple different datafiles to parse and correlate. So this week we are going to load additional perfmon data and learn how to plot that into the same graph.
Since we might want to use our generated graphs in reports or on a webpage, we'll also look into ways to export the generated graphs.

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions have been gaining traction for the last few years with the number of deployments now increasing rapidly. IT decision makers are considering HCI when scoping new deployments or hardware refreshes especially for applications already virtualised on VMware. Reasons for choosing HCI include; dealing with a single vendor, validated interoperability between all hardware and software components, high performance especially IO, simple scalability by addition of hosts, simplified deployment and simplified management.

It has been noticed that some customers running JAVA programs (for example, FOP) on AIX would see the server eventually running low then out of memory. Customer would notice the system pages heavily and user experience becomes bad. And the server would crash when out of memory.

When the problem happens, we can see in ipcs a lot of shared memory segment marked for deletion (Capital D at the beginning of MODE section). This means they will not disappear until the last process attached to the segment detaches it.

Myself and the other Technology Architects often have to explain to customers and vendors Caché IO requirements and the way that Caché applications will use storage systems. The following tables are useful when explaining typical Caché IO profile and requirements for a transactional database application with customers and vendors. The original tables were created by Mark Bolinsky.

In future posts I will be discussing more about storage IO so am also posting these tables now as a reference for those articles.

InterSystems Data Platforms and performance - Part 5 Monitoring with SNMP