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#SQL

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SQL is a standard language for storing, manipulating and retrieving data in relational databases.

We have a yummy dataset with recipes written by multiple Reddit users, however most of the information is free text as the title or description of a post. Let's find out how we can very easily load the dataset, extract some features and analyze it using features from OpenAI large language model within Embedded Python and the Langchain framework.

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Article
· May 11, 2021 8m read
IRIS in Astronomy

In this article we are going to show the results of the comparision between IRIS and Postgress when handling Astronomy data.

Introduction

Since the earliest days of human civilization we have been fascinated by the sky at night. There are so many stars! Everybody has dreamed about them and fantasized about life in other planets.

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Let me introduce my new project, which is irissqlcli, REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) for InterSystems IRIS SQL

  • Syntax Highlighting
  • Suggestions (tables, functions)
  • 20+ output formats
  • stdin support
  • Output to files

Install it with pip

pip install irissqlcli

Or run with docker

docker run -it caretdev/irissqlcli irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM:SYS@host.docker.internal:1972/USER

Connect to IRIS

$ irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM@localhost:1972/USER -W
Password for _SYSTEM:
Server:  InterSystems IRIS Version 2022.3.0.606 xDBC Protocol Version 65
Version: 0.1.0
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> select $ZVERSION
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Expression_1                                                                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IRIS for UNIX (Ubuntu Server LTS for ARM64 Containers) 2022.3 (Build 606U) Mon Jan 30 2023 09:05:12 EST |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set
Time: 0.063s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> help
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Command  | Shortcut          | Description                                                |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| .exit    | \q                | Exit.                                                      |
| .mode    | \T                | Change the table format used to output results.            |
| .once    | \o [-o] filename  | Append next result to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
| .schemas | \ds               | List schemas.                                              |
| .tables  | \dt [schema]      | List tables.                                               |
| \e       | \e                | Edit command with editor (uses $EDITOR).                   |
| help     | \?                | Show this help.                                            |
| nopager  | \n                | Disable pager, print to stdout.                            |
| notee    | notee             | Stop writing results to an output file.                    |
| pager    | \P [command]      | Set PAGER. Print the query results via PAGER.              |
| prompt   | \R                | Change prompt format.                                      |
| quit     | \q                | Quit.                                                      |
| tee      | tee [-o] filename | Append all results to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
Time: 0.012s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER>

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With the release of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, we're getting more frequent questions about how to establish secure connections over JDBC and other driver technologies. While we have nice summary and detailed documentation on the driver technologies themselves, our documentation does not go as far to describe individual client tools, such as our personal favourite DBeaver. In this article, we'll describe the steps to create a secure connection from DBeaver to your Cloud SQL deployment.

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Article
· Sep 18, 2023 7m read
Vectors support, well almost

Nowadays so much noise around LLM, AI, and so on. Vector databases are kind of a part of it, and already many different realizations for the support in the world outside of IRIS.

Why Vector?

  • Similarity Search: Vectors allow for efficient similarity search, such as finding the most similar items or documents in a dataset. Traditional relational databases are designed for exact match searches, which are not suitable for tasks like image or text similarity search.
  • Flexibility: Vector representations are versatile and can be derived from various data types, such as text (via embeddings like Word2Vec, BERT), images (via deep learning models), and more.
  • Cross-Modal Searches: Vectors enable searching across different data modalities. For instance, given a vector representation of an image, one can search for similar images or related texts in a multimodal database.

And many other reasons.

So, for this pyhon contest, I decided to try to implement this support. And unfortunately I did not manage to finish it in time, below I'll explain why.

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What I find really useful about IRIS when teaching my subject of Postrelational databases is the fact that it is a multi model database. Which means that I can actually go into architecture and structure and all that only once but then show the usage of different models (like object, document, hierarchy) using the same language and approach. And it is not a huge leap to go from an object oriented programming language (like C#, Java etc) to an object oriented database.

However, along with advantages (which are many) come some drawbacks when we switch from object oriented model to relational. When I say that you can get access to the same data using different models I need to also explain how it is possible to work with lists and arrays from object model in relational table. With arrays it is very simple - by default they are represented as separate tables and that's the end of it. With lists - it's harder because by default it's a string. But one still wants to do something about it without damaging the structure and making this list unreadable in the object model.

So in this article I will showcase a couple of predicates and a function that are useful when working with lists, and not just as fields.

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Hello IRIS Community,

InterSystems Certification is developing a certification exam for InterSystems IRIS SQL specialists, and if you match the exam candidate description given below, we would like you to beta test the exam. The exam will be available for beta testing on June 9 - 12, 2024 at InterSystems Global Summit 2024, but only for Summit registrants (visit this page to learn more about Certification at GS24). Beta testing will open for all other interested beta testers on June 24, 2024. However, interested beta testers should sign up now by emailing certification@intersystems.com (please let us know if you will be beta testing at Global Summit or in our online proctored environment). The beta testing must be completed by August 2, 2024.

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Article
· Jun 12, 2023 3m read
LangChain fixed the SQL for me

This article is a simple quick starter (what I did was) with SqlDatabaseChain.

Hope this ignites some interest.

Many thanks to:

sqlalchemy-iris author @Dmitry Maslennikov

Your project made this possible today.

The article script uses openai API so caution not to share table information and records externally, that you didn't intend to.

A local model could be plugged in , instead if needed.

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InterSystems is pleased to announce the General Availability of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML, two foundational services for developing cloud-native solutions powered by the proven, enterprise-class performance and reliability of InterSystems IRIS technology.

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GmOwl is a solution that offers an organized and engaging learning platform. It was developed to cater to the increasing need, for learning tools providing a versatile quiz environment that meets users requirements.

The main objective of GmOwl is to deliver an user experience for individuals participating in quizzes while giving administrators comprehensive control, over content and user engagement.

GmOwl uses Java EE with MVC template, and the InterSystems IRIS database is used to store data. The InterSystems JDBC Driver is used to connect to the database.

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Introduction

Say you have a receiving system that accepts HL7 and provides error messages in field ERR:3.9 in the ACK it returns. You require a different reply code action depending on the error message, however the Reply Code Actions settings for the operation do not provide this level of granularity. One option could be to create a process that takes the ACK and then completes the action you were expecting, however things can get a bit messy if the action is to retry the message, especially when trying to view a message trace.

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Article
· Feb 3 3m read
SQL Host Variables missing ?

Host Variables are a rather common programming feature in many implementations of SQL.
A recent question in DC made me aware that in IRIS, Caché, Ensemble, ...
host variables just exist within embedded SQL

> You can supply host variables for Embedded SQL queries only. <

Related examples are included in the available Documentation

This is a description for a workaround if you don't / can't use embedded SQL.

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Article
· Jan 10, 2023 4m read
Columnar Storage in 2022.3

As you may well remember from Global Summit 2022 or the 2022.2 launch webinar, we're releasing an exciting new capability for including in your analytics solutions on InterSystems IRIS. Columnar Storage introduces an alternative way of storing your SQL table data that offers an order-of-magnitude speedup for analytical queries. First released as an experimental feature in 2022.2, the latest 2022.3 Developer Preview includes a bunch of updates we thought were worth a quick post here.

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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.

%PARALLEL is ignored when it applied to:

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The Caché System Management Portal includes a robust web-based SQL query tool, but for some applications it’s more convenient to use a dedicated SQL client installed on a user’s PC.

SQuirreL SQL is a well known open source SQL client built in Java, which uses JDBC to connect to a DBMS. As such, we can configure SQuirreL to connect to Caché using the Caché JDBC driver.

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Article
· May 20, 2016 12m read
Collations in Caché

Order is a necessity for everyone, but not everyone understands it in the same way
(Fausto Cercignani)

Disclaimer: This article uses Russian language and Cyrillic alphabet as examples, but is relevant for anyone who uses Caché in a non-English locale.
Please note that this article refers mostly to NLS collations, which are different than SQL collations. SQL collations (such as SQLUPPER, SQLSTRING, EXACT which means no collation, TRUNCATE, etc.) are actual functions that are explicitly applied to some values, and whose results are sometimes explicitly stored in the global subscripts. When stored in subscripts, these values would naturally follow the NLS collation in effect (“SQL and NLS Collations”).

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Article
· Mar 2, 2023 3m read
Quick sample database tutorial

Introduction

This is a simple tutorial on the quickest way I found to create a sample database for any purposes such as testing, making samples for tutorials, etc.

Creating a namespace

  1. Open the terminal
  2. Write the command "D $SYSTEM.SQL.Shell()"
  3. Write "CREATE DATABASE " and the name you want for your namespace.

Now you have a new namespace in a faster way than creating it from the Management Portal - which of course offers way more configuration options.

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What is Unstructured Data?
Unstructured data refers to information lacking a predefined data model or organization. In contrast to structured data found in databases with clear structures (e.g., tables and fields), unstructured data lacks a fixed schema. This type of data includes text, images, videos, audio files, social media posts, emails, and more.

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Hello Everyone,

The Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services is in the process of developing two exams focused on using SQL in InterSystems IRIS and we need input from our InterSystems IRIS SQL community. Your input will be used to evaluate and establish the contents of the exam.

How do I provide my input? We will present you with a list of job tasks, and you will rate them on their importance as well as other factors.

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sql-embedding cover

InterSystems IRIS 2024 recently introduced the vector types.
This addition empowers developers to work with vector search, enabling efficient similarity searches, clustering, and a range of other applications.
In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of vector types, explore their applications, and provide practical examples to guide your implementation.

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Earlier in this series, we've presented four different demo applications for iKnow, illustrating how its unique bottom-up approach allows users to explore the concepts and context of their unstructured data and then leverage these insights to implement real-world use cases. We started small and simple with core exploration through the Knowledge Portal, then organized our records according to content with the Set Analysis Demo, organized our domain knowledge using the Dictionary Builder Demo and finally build complex rules to extract nontrivial patterns from text with the Rules Builder Demo.

This time, we'll dive into a different area of the iKnow feature set: iFind. Where iKnow's core APIs are all about exploration and leveraging those results programmatically in applications and analytics, iFind is focused specifically on search scenarios in a pure SQL context. We'll be presenting a simple search portal implemented in Zen that showcases iFind's main features.

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