Hey All!

I wanted to reach out and get some advice on the best way to interact with a external SQL database, as I'm finding the documentation quite confusing to follow. I'm new to using SQL within InterSystem, and I want to make sure I'm following the best practices.

In essence, what I am trying to achieve, is extracting certain values from a HL7 message and then insert those message field values into an external database. The ODBC, DSN and Credentials details are all setup and working correctly.

1. Introduction

Epidemiological surveillance is one of the foundational pillars of public health. Régis Júnior et al. (2026) define it as a continuous system of data collection, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of health events — a function whose effectiveness depends critically on the quality of information systems, data analysis capacity, and coordination between different levels of care.

Abstract

Common Table Expressions (CTEs) provide a structured framework for defining reusable intermediate result sets within SQL statements. InterSystems IRIS implements CTEs via the WITH clause, enabling clearer query composition and modular analytical processing while remaining fully integrated with the IRIS cost-based optimizer.

This article explores the semantics of CTEs in InterSystems IRIS, explains their interaction with query optimization, discusses appropriate deployment scenarios, and presents executable examples illustrating practical patterns for production environments.

Hi Community,

Have you ever wished your EHR could think? Not just display data. Not just fire alerts. But actually read a patient record, reason over clinical guidelines, and write a structured referral order back to the system — in response to a single message from a clinician

In this article, I am going to show you how to create your own custom clinical AI agent.

🏥 About iris-fhir-agents App

iris-fhir-agents is a multi-agent clinical AI platform built entirely on InterSystems IRIS for Health.

When I started building Smart Discharge Navigator, I faced a common challenge: FHIR data is stored as JSON bundles, but the analysis I needed required joining multiple resources together, the kind of thing SQL was built for.

InterSystems FHIR SQL Builder solved this completely. Instead of parsing JSON bundles in application code, I was able to write plain SQL directly against FHIR resource projections inside IRIS for Health. This article shows exactly how I used it to build the population-level readmission risk scoring engine at the heart of the application.

In our previous article, we explored the basics of unit testing in IRIS and the ways to apply it to a REST API. We even figured out how to test logic before finalizing network configurations and authentication, allowing us to focus solely on testing the API contents. Today, we will build upon that foundation and elevate our unit testing strategy by using another tool: %Populate .

At first glance, the %Populate class appears to be very simple. You can create a class that extends both %Persistent and %Populate and inherit a Populate method designed to generate randomized records.

Hi Community,

In traditional InterSystems SQL, I can use the %NOINDEX keyword during a bulk INSERT to improve performance and then run BUILD INDEX %ALL afterward to populate the indices.

I am looking to implement a similar strategy for an InterSystems FHIR Server.

1. Is there a way to import/save FHIR resources while skipping the search table extraction (the FHIR version of %NOINDEX)?
2. Once the data is loaded, what is the correct programmatic way to "rebuild" the search tables?

Thank you!

Hello Community,  

What is the most efficient, memory-safe way to get the names of the corrupted indexes on very large tables for a rebuild. However, if an index has millions of corrupted rows, the .errors array in %ValidateIndices grows too large and throws a errorerror.

Hi Community,

Do you build and manage applications with InterSystems IRIS SQL?

🎓Two tiers of certifications—specialist and professional (new!)—are now available! 

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA demand that organizations know exactly where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) lives inside their databases. Yet in practice, most teams rely on manual inventories, tribal knowledge, or external scanning tools that require data to leave the database engine — a process that itself creates privacy and security risks.

This article presents an MVP that takes a different approach: it runs PII detection inside InterSystems IRIS using Embedded Python, analyzing data where it lives and never exporting it to an external process.

I need to analyse and improve the performance on some old SQL statements.

One statement uses NVL in the WHERE clause (no wonder why it's slow) but I still have to improve the performance and the data really needs to be the same when returned.

SELECT *
FROM TOURHead, TOURFIND, SGNRFIND, TNRHead
WHERE TOURHead.cl = '123'
AND TOURHead.cl = TOURFIND.cl
AND TOURHead.TOURNR = TOURFIND.TOURNR
AND TOURFIND.cl =* SGNRFIND.cl
AND TOURFIND.SGNR    =* SGNRFIND.SGNR
AND TOURFIND.cl = TNRHead.cl
AND NVL(TOURFIND.TNR, SGNRFIND.TNR) = TNRHead.TNR;

Really hope someone can help me with this one.

Hi, Community!

Have you tried using serial objects in InterSystems IRIS? Explore some of the benefits and see how to start using them:

Using Serial Objects for Embedded Data Modeling

Hello everyone,

The Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services is excited to announce the release of our new InterSystems IRIS SQL Professional exam. It is now available for purchase and scheduling in the InterSystems exam catalog. This exam is geared towards IRIS SQL experts, and it deals with a variety of advanced IRIS SQL topics that you can find in the exam page.

How can I remove UNIQUE NOT NULL from an existing column via DDL?

I currently have a table in production that was originally created via DDL, where the column was defined as UNIQUE NOT NULL:

CREATE TABLE database.Books ( ID %Library.UniqueIdentifier PRIMARY KEY, TagExternal VARCHAR('') UNIQUE NOT NULL,  

I now need to change this column so that it is no longer UNIQUE and no longer NOT NULL, making it equivalent to:

TagExternal VARCHAR(''),

We have a large, existing production taking a feed from a single up-stream system and sending to a wide-variety of downstream systems. One of the downstream systems has been decommissioned, and we have deleted the classes that implemented the routing/transformations from the namespace, and deleted the components from the production (Wardview and WV Out in the diagram below). We now want to delete the messages associated with those components without deleting the messages associated with any other components.

Table Partitioning Demo

This demo walks you through the new Table Partitioning feature in IRIS SQL, explaining what it does and how it works along the way. We'll only use a few dozen rows to prove the concept, but obviously the capability is focused on datasets many orders of magnitude larger.

If you'd like a shorter, higher-level introduction to Table Partitioning, check out the online learning module Managing Tables with Partitioning in InterSystems IRIS

ℹ️ Table Partitioning is included in IRIS 2026.1 as an experimental feature