Sending emails is a common requirement in integration scenarios — whether for client reminders, automatic reports, or transaction confirmations. Static messages quickly become hard to maintain and personalize. This is where the templated_email module comes in, combining InterSystems IRIS Interoperability with the power of Jinja2 templates.

Why Jinja2 for Emails

Jinja2 is a popular templating engine from the Python ecosystem that enables fully dynamic content generation. It supports:

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Introduction

In a previous article, I presented the IRIStool module, which seamlessly integrates the pandas Python library with the IRIS database. Now, I'm explaining how we can use IRIStool to leverage InterSystems IRIS as a foundation for intelligent, semantic search over healthcare data in FHIR format.

This article covers what I did to create the database for another of my projects, the FHIR Data Explorer. Both projects are candidates in the current InterSystems contest, so please vote for them if you find them useful.

You can find them at the Open Exchange:

In this article we'll cover:

  • Connecting to InterSystems IRIS database through Python
  • Creating a FHIR-ready database schema
  • Importing FHIR data with vector embeddings for semantic search

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Embeddedpy-bridge: A Toolkit for Embedded Python

Overview

Embedded Python is a game-changer for InterSystems IRIS, offering access to the vast Python ecosystem directly within the database. However, bridging the gap between ObjectScript and Python can sometimes feel like translating between two different worlds.

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How to set up RAG for OpenAI agents using IRIS Vector DB in Python

In this article, I’ll walk you through an example of using InterSystems IRIS Vector DB to store embeddings and integrate them with an OpenAI agent.

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Ever since I started using IRIS, I have wondered if we could create agents on IRIS. It seemed obvious: we have an Interoperability GUI that can trace messages, we have an underlying object database that can store SQL, Vectors and even Base64 images. We currently have a Python SDK that allows us to interface with the platform using Python, but not particularly optimized for developing agentic workflows. This was my attempt to create a Python SDK that can leverage several parts of IRIS to support development of agentic systems.

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Introduction

Earlier this year, I set about creating kit to introduce young techy folk at a Health Tech hackathon to using InterSystems IRIS for health, particularly focusing on using FHIR and vector search.

I wanted to publish this to the developer community because the tutorials included in the kit make a great introduction to using FHIR and to building a basic RAG system in IRIS. Its an all inclusive set of tutorials to show in detail how to:

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TL;DR: This article demonstrates how to run GraphRAG-style hybrid retrieval—combining vector similarity, graph traversal, and full-text search—entirely within InterSystems IRIS using the iris-vector-graph package. We use a fraud detection scenario to show how graph patterns reveal what vector search alone would miss.

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Vector search is a retrieval method that converts text, images, audio, and other data into numeric vectors using an AI model, and then searches for items that are semantically close. It enables “semantic similarity search” from free text, which is difficult with keyword search alone.

However, in real use, I encountered cases where results that are “close in meaning” but logically the opposite appeared near the top of the search results.

This is a serious issue in situations where affirmation vs. negation matters. If the system returns the wrong answer, the impact can be significant, so we cannot ignore this problem.

This article does not propose a new algorithm. I wrote it to share a practical way I found useful when semantic search fails due to negation.

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Senior engineering is defined not by the volume of code produced, but by the strategic avoidance of it. In complex integration environments, the tendency to utilize general-purpose libraries for every niche requirement introduces unnecessary overhead. True architectural maturity requires a commitment to "minimalist tooling"—prioritizing resilient, battle-tested system utilities over custom logic.

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