#SQL

Have some free text fields in your application that you wish you could search efficiently? Tried using some methods before but found out that they just cannot match the performance needs of your customers? Do I have one weird trick that will solve all your problems? Don’t you already know!? All I do is bring great solutions to your performance pitfalls!

As usual, if you want the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) version, skip to the end. Just know you are hurting my feelings.

Finding errors in your code or examining unexpected behavior is the main purpose of Debugging
I will try to refresh the traditional tools away from the helpers you have in Studio, VScode, Serenji, ....
to the basics which have been there before your preferred EDI used it in the background.

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:

Class Queries in InterSystems IRIS (and Cache, Ensemble, HealthShare) is a useful tool that separates SQL queries from Object Script code. Basically, it works like this: suppose that you want to use the same SQL query with different arguments in several different places.In this case you can avoid code duplication by declaring the query body as a class query and then calling this query by name. This approach is also convenient for custom queries, in which the task of obtaining the next row is defined by a developer. Sounds interesting? Then read on!

As you know in Caché / IRIS you have the possibility to define a property as Multidimensional as documented here:
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim
and the explanation of how to use it
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim_values

Though the access is quite comfortable (in traditional COS sense) there are 2 main restrictions that hurt:

#1) It is not saved to disk unless your application includes code to save it specifically.
#2) It cannot be stored in or exposed through SQL tables
there are some more
I'll show how to overcome these limits

The typical WHERE condition in SQL relates mostly to some content of the rows you work on.
So it needs to be calculated and checked for each row you access.
Differently (and that's why I named it STATIC) is a WHERE condition that is independent of the rows you access.

While the classic solution followed rather close the concepts and design of the ancestors
Caché / IRIS allows a more modern approach to flexible/multidimensional properties

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.

The 2021.2 release of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform includes many exciting new features for fast, flexible and secure development of your mission-critical applications. Embedded Python definitely takes the limelight (and for good reason!), but in SQL we've also made a massive step forward towards a more adaptive engine that gathers detailed statistical information about your table data and exploits it to deliver the best query plans. In this brief series of articles, we'll take a closer at three elements that are new in 2021.2 and work together towards this goal, starting with Run Time Plan Choice.

It's hard to figure out the right order to talk about these (you can't imagine how often I've reshuffled them in writing this article!) because they fit together in such a nice way. As such, feel free to go on a limb and read these in random order .

A VIEW in SQL is basically a prepared SQL statement.
It has to be executed and assembled like any other SQL query.
MATERIALIZED VIEW means that the content is collected before hands and can be retrieved rather fast.
I saw the concept first with my favorite competitor named O* and they made a lot of noise about it.
{ favorite: because I could win every benchmark against them }

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.

This post is the direct result of working with an InterSystems customer who came to me with the following problem:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM MyCustomTable

Takes 0.005 seconds, total 2300 rows. However:

Every now and then you may encounter a situation where for various reasons
ODBC is the only option to access a remote system. Which is sufficient as long as you need to examine or change tables.
But you can't directly execute some commands or change some Global.

I'm facing a specific sort problem.
There are several thousands of articles sold all over.
Users expect to get a description in local language sorted by their specific collation.