Hey Community!

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

⏯  SQL Tricks and Tips @ Ready 2025

Hello Community! 👋
Welcome to the second part of the IRIS IO Utility series. This extension represents my submission for the InterSystems "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025 and offers you an intuitive and powerful interface for importing and exporting data directly inside VS Code.

• You can find the extension on my GitHub page: pietrodileo/iris_io_utility
• VSIX file to install the extension on VSCode can be found on the related release page: releases: iris-io-utility

If you find this extension useful, please consider voting for me at the contest!

Hi everyone. Long time no see. Again, I would like to share what I am studying recently Create Foreign Tables Using SQL via JDBC.

Since I am learning about the IRIS BI at the same time, so I started with this Sample-BI docker environment

https://github.com/intersystems/Samples-BI

After starting the environment, login to the management portal http://localhost:52773/csp/sys/UtilHome.csp  with the user Superuser.

Switch the namespace to IRISAPP.

😀 We will find out that all the sample data are stored in this namespace IRISAPP

Supply Chain refers to a set of processes and activities performed by the company's business areas and its suppliers and partners (stakeholders), from the acquisition of raw materials, through production, to delivery to the end consumer. It can be better managed using SCM solutions with the orchestration of the InterSystems IRIS:

I'm pleased to announce the publication of gj :: dataLoader, a new VS Code extension that simplifies the task of loading data from local CSV files into SQL tables on your InterSystems IRIS servers.

Here's an introductory video:

gj :: dataLoader is now available on Marketplace for direct installation into VS Code. It is my entry in the "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025 and implements this idea - https://ideas.intersystems.com/ideas/DPI-I-667

Feedback is welcome.

Modern SQL engines are enormously complex pieces of software. Even when they appear stable and mature, subtle bugs can hide in their optimizers, type systems, predicate evaluation, or execution layers. These bugs rarely announce themselves loudly. Instead, they quietly produce incorrect results, behave inconsistently, or fail abruptly under specific combinations of SQL constructs.

This is precisely why tools like SQLancer exist. SQLancer automatically generates SQL queries and uses logical “oracles” to detect when a database behaves incorrectly. It has revealed hundreds of real bugs in widely used systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB.

With this in mind, I attempted to bring SQLancer to InterSystems IRIS, starting with the NOREC oracle — a powerful method for detecting optimizer correctness issues. The journey, however, uncovered not just potential SQL correctness problems, but also a surprising number of driver-level and server-level failures that prevented SQLancer from running at full strength.

This article summarizes why SQLancer is important, how the NOREC oracle works, and what unexpected findings appeared while testing IRIS.

Auditing is a critical capability ensuring the security of your server, and for quite a while ago we have included the ability to audit SQL statements run on the server.

With v2024.3 out already we're providing finer-grained options for defining these events to audit.

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.

To demonstrate this, we’ll create an OpenAI agent with knowledge of InterSystems technology. We’ll achieve this by storing embeddings of some InterSystems documentation in IRIS and then using IRIS vector search to retrieve relevant content—enabling a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow.

Note: Section 1 details how process text into embeddings.

Hello Developers! 👋
I’m excited to introduce IRIS IO Utility, my submission for the InterSystems "Bringing Ideas to Reality" Contest 2025. This VS Code extension provides you an intuitive and powerful interface for importing and exporting data without leaving your IDE. The extension implements and expand this idea submitted on the Ideas Portal turning a common developer need into a real tool: seamless IO operations with any IRIS instance directly inside VS Code.

Hey Community!

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

⏯  Smarter Table Statistics @ Ready 2025

Could someone explain how and why a HL7 ACK be showing up as a Orphaned message when I run the following SQL...
 

SELECT HL7.ID,HL7.DocType,HL7.Envelope,HL7.Identifier,HL7.MessageTypeCategory,HL7.Name,HL7.OriginalDocId,HL7.ParentId, HL7.TimeCreated
FROM EnsLib_HL7.Message HL7
LEFT JOIN Ens.MessageHeader hdr
ON HL7.Id=hdr.MessageBodyId
WHERE hdr.MessageBodyId IS NULL

I am trying to find the problem code that is causing the Orphaned messages, and an ACK showing up seems kind of Odd. While we do have Archive IO/Trace on, and Index NOT OK's set why would they show up as Orphaned messages?

InterSystems IRIS provides extensive configurable security options, yet many developers primarily use roles and resources to secure entire tables or routines. Today, we will delve deeper. We can also secure individual columns and rows separately, but these two mechanisms operate very differently. Let's begin with the columns.

Column Security

For testing and demonstration, we will keep our table structure concise and straightforward. We have a table called "Person" in the USER namespace that contains an ID column, a date of birth column (DOB), first name, and last name. 

Welcome to the monthly recap of updates and releases to VS Code and InterSystems-related extensions that are relevant to IRIS developers. 

We'll break down the updates that are relevant to InterSystems developers with tips on how they can be applied to your day-to-day projects. 

Don't forget, if you're migrating from InterSystems Studio to VS Code, or want to deepen your knowledge, check out the VS Code training courses from George James Software: georgejames.com/vscode-training. 

VS Code version 1.106

Unified AI-agent dashboard - 1.

We're excited to announce the Early Access Program for IntegratedML Custom Models, a powerful new capability coming in IRIS 2026.1!

What Is It?

IntegratedML Custom Models extends the existing IntegratedML/AutoML feature by letting you deploy your own custom Python ML models directly within SQL queries.

The Load Data utility it is an excellent tool to load data from CSV/TXT files into an IRIS SQL Table, but it is required send the target file to the IRIS server and write the Load Data sentence to ingest the file content. Now it is possible select a file in VSCode, set the table destination and submit the request. The vscode-load-data utility will send the file to the IRIS server and run the Load Data command to you! Very simple:

Hey Community!

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

⏯  Query Optimization in Hybrid Databases @ Ready 2025

When using standard SQL or the object layer in InterSystems IRIS, metadata consistency is usually maintained through built-in validation and type enforcement. However, legacy systems that bypass these layers—directly accessing globals—can introduce subtle and serious inconsistencies.

Understanding how drivers behave in these edge cases is crucial for diagnosing legacy data issues and ensuring application reliability.
The DATATYPE_SAMPLE database is designed to help analyze error scenarios where column values do not conform to the data types or constraints defined in the metadata.

In Part 1, we explored how window functions operate. We learned the logic behind PARTITION BY, ORDER BY, and such functions as ROW_NUMBER() and RANK(). Now, in Part 2, let's delve into more window functions with practical examples.

1. Aggregate-over-Window Functions

Overview

These functions compute an aggregate (e.g., sum, average, min, max, count, etc.) over the defined window frame but don’t collapse rows.
Each row remains visible, augmented with aggregated values for its partition.

Supported functions include the following:

• AVG() — average of values in the window frame.

Parallel query hinting boosts certain query performances on multi-processor systems via parallel processing. The SQL optimizer determines when this is beneficial. On single-processor systems, this hint has no effect.

Parallel processing can be managed by:

1.  Setting the auto parallel option system-wide.
   

2. Using the %PARALLEL keyword in the FROM clause of specific queries.

Embedded SQL is a tool that allows us to execute SQL statements in Caché Object Script. For example, to select the name of a person with a particular SSN from the Sample.Person class we can do the following:

&SQL(
SELECT Name into :tName
From Sample.Person
Where SSN = :tSSN
)

The colon syntax is used to identify local variables, in this case tName and tSSN. Here, tSSN will be defined prior to execution and  tName  will be set during execution of the statement. &SQL indicates to our compiler that this is SQL syntax.

InterSystems Cloud JDBC SQL Shell

A simple way to connect, explore, and debug InterSytems Cloud Services over JDBC with sqlline.

Hi,

When we open a terminal in IRIS, we are entering the ObjectScript shell. Within this shell, we can execute IRIS commands, such as:

In other words, the ObjectScript command is executed in the current shell. But it's always good to remember that IRIS has other shells

• SQL
• Python
• TSQL
• MDX

One very interesting aspect is shortcuts. We can access these shells through their calls or via shortcuts, as shown in the table below:

Hey Community!

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

⏯  Optimizing Parallel Aggregation Using Shared Globals @ Ready 2025

In today’s healthcare data landscape, FHIR has become the standard for structured clinical data exchange. However, while FHIR excels at interoperability, its JSON format makes analytics challenging—including FHIR QuestionnaireResponse.

Three Steps to Build It

1.

Hi everyone,
I'm getting prepared to take the following certification exam: "InterSystems IRIS Development Professional".

Can you give some advice on how to prepare (aside from the official course page: https://www.intersystems.com/certifications/intersystems-iris-development-professional/)?
Do you have examples of quiz questions that simulate the real exam or any material that helped you getting prepared?

Thanks you in advance,

Arber

Hey Community!

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

⏯  Foreign Tables In 2025.2 @ Ready 2025

Hello!

I'm trying to create some foreign tables to a PostgreSQL database. In some cases, columns with certain datatypes cannot be consumed by IRIS and the following error is thrown:

 [SQLCODE: <-237>:<Schema import for foreign table did not return column metadata>]

  [%msg: <Unkown data type returned by external database>]

For example: serial4 typed ID columns are typical examples. Is it possible, what's the best way of resolving these datatypes, which- seemingly- don't have proper JDBC metadata mappings?

Hi Community, 
In this article, we will explore the concepts of Dynamic SQL and Embedded SQL within the context of InterSystems IRIS, provide practical examples, andexamine their differences to help you understand how to leverage them in your applications.

InterSystems SQL provides a full set of standard relational features, including the ability to define table schema, execute queries, and define and execute stored procedures. You can execute InterSystems SQL interactively from the Management Portal or programmatically using a SQL shell interface. Embedded SQL enables you to embed SQL statements in your ObjectScript code, while Dynamic SQL enables you to execute dynamic SQL statements from ObjectScript at runtime. While static SQL queries offer predictable performance, dynamic and embedded SQL offer flexibility and integration, respectively.

Hey Community!

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

⏯  Document Server: Improving Performance While Reducing Stored Data @ Ready 2025
 

Window functions in InterSystems IRIS let you perform powerful analytics — like running totals, rankings, and moving averages — directly in SQL.
They operate over a "window" of rows related to the current row, without collapsing results like GROUP BY.
This means you can write cleaner, faster, and more maintainable queries — no loops, no joins, no temp tables.

In this article let's understand the mechanics of window functions by addressing some common data analisys tasks.

Introduction to SQL Window Functions in InterSystems IRIS

SQL window functions are a powerful tool for data analysis.