#SQL

The August Article Bounty on the Global Masters article caught my attention, and one of the proposed topics sounded quite interesting in regard to its future use in my teaching. So, here's what I'd like to tell my students about tables in IRIS and how they correlate with the object model.

First of all, InterSystems IRIS boasts a unified data model. This means that when you work with data, you are not locked into a single paradigm. The same data can be accessed and manipulated as a traditional SQL table, as a native object, or even as a multidimensional array (a global). It means that when you create an SQL table, IRIS automatically creates a corresponding object class. When you define an object class, IRIS automatically makes it available as an SQL table. The data itself is stored only once in IRIS's efficient multidimensional storage engine. The SQL engine and the object engine are simply different "lenses" to view and work with the same data.

First, let's look at the correlation between the relational model and the object model:

It's not always a 1:1 correlation, as you may have several tables represent one class, for example. But it's a general rule of thumb.

Or can I change namespaces within one connection object?

Hi folks!

It is very easy to import CSV data into IRIS. But what if we want to preserve the original IDs in CSV?

Recently I came across with the situation when I needed to import two csv's into IRIS which were linked by one column referencing to another csv's col: a typical Foreign Key and Primary Key situation, where csv1 contains this column as Primary Key, and csv2 as Foreign key with id's related to csv1.

The image is generated by ChatGPT so don't blame it - it tried its best to generate countries as primary keys with countries.csv-cities.csv relationship :)

I had a need for a Filter, but did not want to recreate the wheel by creating another Data Lookup Table, so instead I created a Linked Table that points to a MS SQL Table outside of IRIS.

Once I had the Linked Table, I created a Class Method Function that would query the Linked Table and return a 1 if a result came back.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that no matter how polished your application logic is, database performance will eventually make or break the user experience. Working with InterSystems IRIS, I recently ran into this firsthand. A client of ours was building a reporting dashboard that worked flawlessly during testing—but once their production dataset grew into the millions, response times slowed to a crawl.