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.

Introduction

InterSystems IRIS allows you to build REST APIs using ObjectScript classes and the %CSP.REST framework. This enables the development of modern services to expose data for web apps, mobile apps, or system integrations.

In this article, you'll learn how to create a basic REST API in InterSystems IRIS, including:

• A persistent data class
• A REST class with GET and POST methods
• A web application to expose the API

• A full demonstration using Docker

I need to reproduce a table (in fact a view, but let's start with a simple table 😊) in IRIS as the currently used in Oracle.

I need to expose/project one column to JDBC as CLOB, in my class I have the corresponding property defined as:

Property GlobStream As %Stream.GlobalCharacter;

In JDBC this column is projected as LONGVARCHAR, this is compliant with the documentation but I need to project it as CLOB.

In addition, I'm no expert in JDBC but wit seems that LONGVARCHAR has a Maximum Length 32,700 characters in JDBC, not quite enough for an arbitrary stream.

Why do these clauses affect SQL performance?

select ID from some_table where row_status in ('I','U') order by ID limit 5 - makes the query infinite select top 10 ID from some_table where row_status in ('I','U') order by ID - the same select ID from some_table where row_status in ('I','U') order by ID - is fast

Actually there are no rows in the table having row_status 'I' or 'U'.

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.

The 2025.1.3 maintenance releases of InterSystems IRIS^® data platform,InterSystems IRIS^® for Health^TM, and HealthShare^® Health Connect are now Generally Available (GA).

Hello everyone,

My team lead mentioned that users can sometimes create globals directly without associating them with tables or classes. In this case, these globals would not be accessible via SQL.

Is this correct? Can a global exist independently in this way, and if so, is there a specific approach to access or manage them without SQL?

10:47 AM — Jose Garcia's creatinine test results arrive at the hospital FHIR server. 2.1 mg/dL — a 35% increase from last month.

What happens next?

• Most systems: ❌ The result sits in a queue until a clinician reviews it manually — hours or days later.
• This system: 👍 An AI agent evaluates the trend, consults clinical guidelines, and generates evidence-based recommendations — in seconds, automatically.

No chatbot. No manual prompts. No black-box reasoning.

This is event-driven clinical decision support with full explainability:

✅ Triggered automatically by FHIR events ✅ Multi-agent reasoning (context, guidelines, recommendations) ✅ Complete audit trail in SQL (every decision, every evidence source) ✅ FHIR-native outputs (DiagnosticReport published to server)

Built with:

• InterSystems IRIS for Health — Orchestration, FHIR, persistence, vector search
• CrewAI — Multi-agent framework for structured reasoning

You'll learn: 🖋️ How to orchestrate agentic AI workflows within production-grade interoperability systems — and why explainability matters more than accuracy alone.

1-command only required for an entire IRIS instance for Data Science projects, and leveraging this to compare query methods' speed (Dynamic SQL, Pandas Query, and Globals).

Before joining InterSystems, I worked in a team of web developers as a data scientist. Most of my day-to-day work involved training and embedding ML models in Python-based backend applications through microservices, mainly built with the Django framework and using Postgres SQL for sourcing the data.

How I Vibecoded a Backend (and Frontend) on InterSystems IRIS

I wanted to try vibecoding a real backend + frontend setup on InterSystems IRIS, ideally using something realistic rather than a toy example. The goal was simple: take an existing, well-known persistent package in IRIS and quickly build a usable UI and API around it — letting AI handle as much of the boilerplate as possible. Here is the result of the experiments.

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.

Hey Community!

We're happy to share a new video from our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Multi-threading an HL7 Interface and scaling beyond FIFO constraints @ Ready 2025

Here at InterSystems, we often deal with massive datasets of structured data. It’s not uncommon to see customers with tables spanning >100 fields and >1 billion rows, each table totaling hundred of GB of data. Now imagine joining two or three of these tables together, with a schema that wasn’t optimized for this specific use case. Just for fun, let’s say you have 10 years worth of EMR data from 20 different hospitals across your state, and you’ve been tasked with finding….

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.

Why Fraud Detection Needs Graphs

Every year, businesses and consumers lose billions to fraud. In 2024 alone, consumers reported $12.5 billion lost—a 25% increase year over year. What makes modern fraud so difficult to detect is that fraudsters rarely work alone.

As mentioned in the previous article, it is possible to configure the way you wish your collections to be stored and queried in SQL.

To set this up, you will need to use the following field parameters and settings:

In InterSystems IRIS, when you compile a persistent class, you automatically get a SQL table. Sometimes, there are situations that require having a slightly (or not so slightly) different names/options in SQL compared to Object model. Here are some of the settings that you can change to make it happen.

Class-level settings 

They define the "Face" of your class when it appears as a table in the SQL catalog.

SqlTableName allows you to change the name of SQL table that holds objects from your class. This is especially useful, when your class name uses reserved SQL words in a name, e.g. Group.

Hi folks!

Is there any way to know the text of the SQL queries executed against the IRIS server?

My case: I have an SQL class query with a few parameters and and some combination of values causes unexpected results.

It'd be great if I could just copy the query from some log of queries done vs my IRIS the server. Cannot find it easily, though. Any advice?

SETassigns value to the variable at RUNTIME.

#DIM declare the variable and it's Data Type at COMPILE TIME.

#DIM name As %String
Set name = "Micheal Scott"
#DIM age As %Numeric
Set age = 36
#DIM employer As App.Employer               ; compile time
Set employer = ##class(App.Employer).%New() ; runtime 

SETor #DIM? Your design, your rules.

New to using Analytics and using Dashboards. We have this Report, SQL Query that lists out the Activity per Data Source in Health Share Provider Directory. Instead of running it as a report, because it takes a while to run, was wondering if there is a way to do this as a Dashboard instead.

How can I take the SQL from this report and create a Dashboard instead?

Hello,

We are accessing an InterSystems Cacha database from Microsoft SQL Server using a linked server over ODBC (ODBC35). Queries are executed using OPENQUERY.

On the SQL Server side, there is a linked server property called Query Timeout. By default it is set to 0 (no timeout). We are considering setting it to 15 seconds and would like to understand how Cache behaves in this scenario.

I have a Photo that is stored as an VARBINARY within MS SQL. I would like to Select the data into a EnsLib.SQL.Snapshot, is that possible? I would take it out of the Snapshot and send it to a %Stream so it can be written out to a file.

Defining my first REST API within InterSystems using iris-rest-Api-template as a basis and I am seeing if someone could provide me some guidance to see if I can make it work.  

In some of my other posts, I have been trying to come up with a way for our Enterprise Application Development team which works with .Net to build Applications to make a REST call to our instance of InterSystems to query some of the Cache Tables we have defined. 

Using the iris-rest-api-template, I have created the osuwmc.DataLookup.REST.Base.cls

Class osuwmc.DataLookup.REST.Base Extends %CSP.

There is a Master Table within IRIS that I am populating from Epic but want to share it with our Enterprise Application Development Team (Web). As a test I was able to use _SYSTEM from postman to execute the following.

POST /api/atelier/v1/xxxx/action/query HTTP/1.1
Host: xxxxxxxx
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: ••••••
Cookie: CSPSESSIONID-SP-443-UP-api-atelier-=00f0000000000AKyLjBfUvU$MpFD8UT8y$EoNKNw1ixZeXN4_Q; CSPWSERVERID=hzZAT5rb
Content-Length: 86

{"query": "SELECT * FROM osuwmc_Epic_Clarity.

Hi developers!

There is a neat feature of ObjectScript classes - Query element, which allows you to write in a clear SQL (without any & or ()), pass parameters to it and call it from ObjectScript as do QueryNameFunc() or via Call SQLProcedureName via SQL, .e.g.

Query MyQuery(p as %String) as %SQLQuery [SQLProc]

{ 

SELECT * FROM MyTable 

WHERE Name=:p

}

All works fine, but when I tried to use the same for a DELETE statement see the following error:

SELECT expected, DELETE found ^ DECLARE Q1 CURSOR FOR DELETE

Is the Query element for SELECT only? What am I doing wrong? )

The Rut

Up until early this year, I haven't been not doing much coding at all -- I had gotten sick of it.

After many years as a hands-on software engineer and data scientist, I got burned out around 2015. I switched to business development roles focused on "external innovation," then joined InterSystems in 2019 as a product manager. I missed the creative aspects of coding, but not the tedium. The endless cycle of boilerplate, debugging, and context-switching had left me creatively depleted.

Hey Developers,

Enjoy the new video on InterSystems Developers YouTube

⏯  Inside Vector Search - Technical Innovations In InterSystems IRIS @ READY 2025

Looking at my database I see I have a very big ^rINDEXSQL global? Why is that? 😬

In the Management Portal SQL page, under "SQL Statements" I see a 'Clean stale' button - what does this do? 🤔

In the list of Statements some have a 'Location' value and some don't? How is that? 🤨

Hey Community!

We're happy to share a new video from our InterSystems Developers YouTube:

⏯  Using InterSystems Data Studio with Supply Chain Module as a Data Gateway @ Ready 2025