Date range queries going too slow for you? SQL Performance got you down? I have one weird trick that might just help you out! (SQL Developers hate this!)*

If you have a class that records timestamps when the data is added, then that data will be in sequence with your IDKEY values - that is, TimeStamp1 < TimeStamp2 if and only if ID1 < ID2 for all IDs and TimeStamp values in table - then you can use this knowledge to increase performance for queries against TimeStamp ranges. Consider the following table:

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The Caché System Management Portal includes a robust web-based SQL query tool, but for some applications it’s more convenient to use a dedicated SQL client installed on a user’s PC.

SQuirreL SQL is a well known open source SQL client built in Java, which uses JDBC to connect to a DBMS. As such, we can configure SQuirreL to connect to Caché using the Caché JDBC driver.

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Article
· Feb 5, 2016 11m read
Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS

Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS (and Cache, Ensemble, HealthShare) is a useful tool that separates SQL queries from Object Script code. Basically, it works like this: suppose that you want to use the same SQL query with different arguments in several different places.In this case you can avoid code duplication by declaring the query body as a class query and then calling this query by name. This approach is also convenient for custom queries, in which the task of obtaining the next row is defined by a developer. Sounds interesting? Then read on!

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Article
· Nov 14, 2016 14m read
Mastering the JDBC SQL Gateway

As we all know, Caché is a great database that accomplishes lots of tasks within itself. However, what do you do when you need to access an external database? One way is to use the Caché SQL Gateway via JDBC. In this article, my goal is to answer the following questions to help you familiarize yourself with the technology and debug some common problems.

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Introduction

In the first article in this series, we’ll take a look at the entity–attribute–value (EAV) model in relational databases to see how it’s used and what it’s good for. Then we'll compare the EAV model concepts to globals.

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Article
· Jun 12, 2023 3m read
LangChain fixed the SQL for me

This article is a simple quick starter (what I did was) with SqlDatabaseChain.

Hope this ignites some interest.

Many thanks to:

sqlalchemy-iris author @Dmitry Maslennikov

Your project made this possible today.

The article script uses openai API so caution not to share table information and records externally, that you didn't intend to.

A local model could be plugged in , instead if needed.

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Article
· Jul 18, 2017 2m read
Old/New Dynamic SQL Cheat Sheet

The newer dynamic SQL classes (%SQL.Statement and %StatementResult) perform better than %ResultSet, but I did not adopt them for some time because I had learned how to use %ResultSet. Finally, I made a cheat sheet, which I find useful when writing new code or rewriting old code. I thought other people might find it useful.

First, here is a somewhat more verbose adaptation of my cheat sheet:

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Article
· May 20, 2016 12m read
Collations in Caché

Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)

Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale.
Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).

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Introduction

The field test of Caché 2016.2 has been available for quite some time and I would like to focus on one of the substantial features that is new in this version: the document data model. This model is a natural addition to the multiple ways we support for handling data including Objects, Tables and Multidimensional arrays. It makes the platform more flexible and suitable for even more use cases.

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Have some free text fields in your application that you wish you could search efficiently? Tried using some methods before but found out that they just cannot match the performance needs of your customers? Do I have one weird trick that will solve all your problems? Don’t you already know!? All I do is bring great solutions to your performance pitfalls!

As usual, if you want the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version, skip to the end. Just know you are hurting my feelings.

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The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (4 of 3)

The forth in the trilogy, anyone a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan?

If you are looking to breathe new life into an old MUMPS application follow these steps to map your globals to classes and expose all that beautiful data to Objects and SQL.

If the above does not sound familiar to you please start at the beginning with the following:

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes (1 of 3)

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The object and relational data models of the Caché database support three types of indexes, which are standard, bitmap, and bitslice. In addition to these three native types, developers can declare their own custom types of indexes and use them in any classes since version 2013.1. For example, iFind text indexes use that mechanism.

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If I have defined a class query in one of my classes and I want to use that query from a method of another class, what are the pros and cons of using the %SQL.Statement interface versus the %Library.ResultSet interface?

I believe %SQL.Statement is the newer interface.

So if the old way is:

USER>s rs=##class(%Library.ResultSet).%New("%Library.File:FileSet")
 
USER>s sc=rs.Execute("c:\s\","*.txt")
 
USER>w sc
1
USER>while rs.%Next() {w !,rs.Data("Name")}

...

then the new way is:

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With the release of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, we're getting more frequent questions about how to establish secure connections over JDBC and other driver technologies. While we have nice summary and detailed documentation on the driver technologies themselves, our documentation does not go as far to describe individual client tools, such as our personal favourite DBeaver. In this article, we'll describe the steps to create a secure connection from DBeaver to your Cloud SQL deployment.

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Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

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Last week, we announced the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, our new and comprehensive platform for all your data endeavours, whether transactional, analytics or both. We've included many of the features our customers know and loved from Caché and Ensemble, but in this article we'll shed a little more light on one of the new capabilities of the platform: SQL Sharding, a powerful new feature in our scalability story.

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Article
· Apr 4, 2023 2m read
InterSystems SQL Cheat Sheet

Hi developers!

As you know InterSystems IRIS besides globals, object, document and XML data-models also support relational where SQL is expected as a language to deal with the data.

And as in other relational DBMS InterSystems IRIS has its own dialect.

I start this post to support an SQL cheatsheet and invite you to share your favorites - I'll update the content upon incoming comments.

Here we go!

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