Article
· Aug 8, 2017 1m read
Outperforming PostgreSQL and MySQL

In a previous exercise, I was able to show the power of Caché.
A medium-designed set of interdependent tables with some GB of data.
URLs cross reference over some million pages resulting in ~3 billion records

Competition was between

  • Caché
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL

Criteria were Speed + Storage consumption
I composed a customized loader fed over a "raw" TCP connection
Mapping the "objects" into the final table by directly writing to Global Storage.,

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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.

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Article
· Jul 18, 2017 2m read
Old/New Dynamic SQL Cheat Sheet

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:

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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."

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Article
· Jul 7, 2017 19m read
Indexing of non-atomic attributes

Quotes (1NF/2NF/3NF)ru:

Every row-and-column intersection contains exactly one value from the applicable domain (and nothing else).
The same value can be atomic or non-atomic depending on the purpose of this value. For example, “4286” can be
  • atomic, if its denotes “a credit card’s PIN code” (if it’s broken down or reshuffled, it is of no use any longer)
  • non-atomic, if it’s just a “sequence of numbers” (the value still makes sense if broken down into several parts or reshuffled)

This article explores the standard methods of increasing the performance of SQL queries involving the following types of fields: string, date, simple list (in the $LB format), "list of <...>" and "array of <...>".

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Article
· May 25, 2017 2m read
The Interns are Coming!

The Data Platforms department here at InterSystems is gearing up for this year's crop of interns, and I for one am very excited to meet them all next week!

We've got folks from top technical colleges with diverse specialties from hard core engineers to pure computer scientists to mathematicians to business professionals. They come from countries around the world like Vietnam, China, and Finland and they all come with impressive backgrounds. We're sure they will do very well this summer.

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Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

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In addition to its general security, Caché offers SQL security with a granularity of a single row. This is called row-level security. With row-level security, each row holds a list of authorized viewers, which can be either users or roles. By default access is determined at object modification Some time ago I became interested in determining row-level security at runtime. Here's how to implement it.

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It is often necessary to sort the results of a query on a string field containing a combination of alphabetic and numeric characters. In cases like this the default string collation may not always return the data in the expected sequence.

An example of this may be where a select from Samples.Person should order the results by the street address, but firstly ordered by the street number part as numeric, and then by the street name.

The default query will return the results as follows:

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Atelier Users:

Has anyone found an Eclipse plug-in that provides the capability to connect to a Caché server and give the user a way to write SQL queries using the tables from that server? I'm picturing something like a "WinSQL"-client built as an Eclipse plugin.

I've found and tried the following, but I couldn't get it to connect to my local Caché instance.

http://eclipsesql.sourceforge.net/

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I am experimenting with Relationships, both Parent to Child and One to Many.

I have done some SQL look-ups and have searched through the documentation, however not in a lot detail, but wonder if there are more and better ways to access both sides of Relationships through SQL?

Thank you in advance for any help provided.

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Hi all,

I have a non objectscript application connecting to a cache instance via ODBC and one column is a list of serial objects. The output from the query contains a lot of special characters and I'm hoping there's a better way to get this data back so I won't have to perform extensive parsing on the application side.

I've tried using the $ListToString() function, but that didn't help much, probably because the list contains complex objects rather than primitives.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

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Hi, folks!

When you deploy DeepSee solutions you often do not want grant a User %All Role to work with a particular Dashboard.

Consider a Dashboard 'Dash' with a few widgets where listings are being used.

If you manage a Role to get access to the Dash you need to grant access to %DB_DBNAME resource to have a database access, grant access to a Dashboard resource (if any) and ... grant SELECT accesses to all the tables involved in SQL queries being used in all the listings of widgets.

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It's almost time to get your customers upgraded to new versions - are you worried about showing off your SQL Performance after upgrades? If you want to upgrade without worrying, then I have just the program for you!!! Check out this video from Global Summit 2016 featuring yours truly explaining how to upgrade a system without worrying about pesky SQL queries showing on your waistline!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfFPYfIoR_g

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Hi,

My doubt is about the SQL Query in Caché:

I don't want to take all results from the table and orgainze them manually, for example: I have a table with 50 records, but I only want to select 10 records, being from tenth until the twentieth and this without knowing their IDs.

So, how can I do this, without losing performance, there is any way?

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Hello, we have a few hundreds of triggers to port from Oracle to Cachè for a migration project, and many of them have to change (for example, normalize a value, null it, etc) the value which is being inserted.

The documentation says "You cannot set {fieldname*N} in trigger code." , so we're unlucky.

Is there a good workaround for this ?

SqlComputeOnChange doesn't seem the best way, but I'm not totally sure: for example normalization and validation could have a better place somewhere else than a trigger.

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I am currently working on a issue with WRC on one of my Inbound SQL Adapters not returning all the records it should be. If I looked at the count of the records in Ensemble and compare it to that of a Microsoft SQL View, Ensemble seems to be off by a few records here and there. I am using a full dynamic select statement in my settings of the adapter.

SELECT Text, PhysicianLastName, PhysicianFirstName, PhysicianAddress1, PhysicianAddress2, PhysicianCity,

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Question
· Jul 22, 2017
select sql error

hi

I execute sql like this: select * from DHC_PatBillDetails where PBD_PBO_ParRef>='2046121'

error message:

but the sql: select * from DHC_PatBillDetails where PBD_PBO_ParRef='2046121' can be executed successfully

why?

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Question
· Nov 19, 2017
Force inner select to be executed

I have a query that I am attempting to run, but inner query is being rolled up into the overall query - per the optimizer (and jobexam observation). While I know that if the inner query runs first, I will eliminate a number of records (making the result set smaller, and return quicker).

Just an example of what I am attempting to do:

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