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:

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.

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.

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.

The Art of Mapping Globals to Classes  (2 of 3)

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.

This example is going to cram in 4 or 5 different things beyond what was covered in Part 1 

Date range queries going too slow for you?  SQL Performance got you down?  I have ANOTHER weird trick that SQL Developers don't want you to know!*

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.

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:

This is the first in a pair of articles on SQL indices.

Part 1 - Know your indices

So I know it's been a while, and I hate to let my adoring fans down... just not enough to actually start writing again.  But the wait is over and I'm back!  Now bask in my beautiful ginger words!

For this series, I am going to look at some common problems we see in the WRC and discuss some common solutions.  Of course, even if you find a solution here, you are always welcome to call in and expression you gratitude, or just hear my voice!

This week's common problem: "My query returns no data."

No doubt bitmap indexing, if used with a suitable property, performs just impressive!
But there is a major limit: ID key has to be a positive integer.
For modern class definitions working with CacheStorage this is a default.

BUT: There are hundreds (thousands ?) old applications out in the field that
are still using composite ID keys.
Or - to name the origin - work on Globals with 2 subscript levels (or more).
They are by construction excluded from our "Bitmap Wonderland".

There are three things most important to any SQL performance conversation:  Indices, TuneTable, and Show Plan.  The attached PDFs includes historical presentations on these topics that cover the basics of these 3 things in one place.  Our documentation provides more detail on these and other SQL Performance topics in the links below.  The eLearning options reinforces several of these topics.  In addition, there are several Developer Community articles which touch on SQL performance, and those relevant links are also listed.

There is a fair amount of repetition in the information listed below.  The most important aspects of SQL performance to consider are:

1. The types of indices available
2. Using one index type over another
3. The information TuneTable gathers for a table and what it means to the Optimizer
4. How to read a Show Plan to better understand if a query is good or bad

As you will know the size of a Global reference is limited to 511 encoded characters. see docs:
http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GGBL_structure#GGBL_structure_maxsubscrlen

I am pleased to announce that Release Candidates of Caché and Ensemble 2017.2 are now available.

Many customers have already downloaded the Field Test over the past few months, and we appreciate your feedback.

This release contains significant improvements, including: