This post provides guidelines for configuration, system sizing and capacity planning when deploying Caché 2015 and later on a VMware ESXi 5.5 and later environment.

Pouring The Coffee: Creating and scheduling a task

Don't you wish a fresh, hot cup of coffee could be waiting for you right when you get into the office? Let's automate that!

Cache and IRIS come with a built-in Task Manager, which should have a familiar feel to those used to using the Windows task scheduler or using cron on Linux. Your user account will need access to the %Admin_Task resource to use it, and you can access it in the management portal under System Operation -> Task Manager. When first installed, there are roughly 20 types of task that you can schedule.

I wanted to write it as a comment to article of @Evgeny Shvarov . But it happens to be so long, so, decided to post it separately.

I would like to add a bit of clarification about how docker uses disk space and how to clean it. I use macOS, so, everything below, is mostly for macOS, but docker commands suit any platform.

This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

Why SSH ?

If you do not have direct access to the server that runs your IRIS Docker container
you still may require access to the container outside "iris session" or "WebTerminal".
With an SSH terminal (PuTTY, KiTTY,.. ) you get access inside Docker, and then, depending
on your needs you run "iris session iris" or display/manipulate files directly.

Note:

Hello developers!
I present to you the project of editors in terminal mode. The full-screen editor of routines, arrays and text files in terminal mode can be useful to you when debugging your project in docker or when your web interface is unavailable or limited for some reason.
Although this project is self-sufficient, I decided to make it as an addition to the ‘zapm’ module for the convenience of calling editor commands.

If your instance does not have a ZPM, then you can install the zapm-editor module in one line:

Hello, developers!

I would like to share the history of the project - the ZAPM shell.

As soon as ZPM was implemented, I immediately began to think about how best to use it.

And immediately faced with the desire to move more quickly between namespaces, especially when there are more than 20 of them.
I had to leave the ZPM, move to the desired namespace and re-enter the shell.
I suggested an improvement - a new "namespace" command for easier navigation.
I didn’t wait - I did it myself. And so it went. If you need it, get ready to do it yourself.

Prometheus is one of the monitoring systems adapted for collecting time series data.

When you first start working with InterSystems IRIS, it’s a common practice to install a system with only a minimum level of security. You have to enter passwords fewer times and this makes it easier to work with development services and web applications when you're first getting acquainted. And, sometimes, minimal security is more convenient for deploying a developed project or solution.
And yet there comes a moment when you need to move your project out of development, into an Internet environment that’s very likely hostile, and it needs to be tested with the maximum security settings (that is, completely locked down) before being deployed to production. And that’s what we’ll discuss in this article.
For more complete coverage of DBMS security issues in InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and IRIS, you may want to read my other article, Recommendations on installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for a production environment.
The security system in InterSystems IRIS is based on the concept of applying different security settings for different categories: users, roles, services, resources, privileges, and applications.

Users can be assigned roles. Users and roles can have privileges on resources — databases, services, and applications — with varying read, write, and use rights. Users and roles can also have SQL privileges on the SQL tables located in databases.

Previously I showed you how to run pButtons to start collecting performance metrics that we are looking at in this series of posts.

One of the topics that comes up often when managing Ensemble productions is disk space:

The database (the CACHE.DAT file) grows in a rate that was unexpected; or the Journal files build up at a fast pace; or the database grows continuously though the system has a scheduled purge of the Ensemble runtime data.

It would have been better if these kind of phenomena would have been observed and accounted for yet at the development and testing stage rather than on a live system.

For this purpose I created a basic framework that could aid in this task.

I hope you already know one of my projects Cache Blocks Explorer. I've recently renamed it to Blocks Explorer.

For the recent contest, I've added a new feature, the ability to generate a static picture of any Cache or IRIS database. Like below. Where unique globals have a unique color. This is how looks like inside 9.5GB database. Where 1 pixel represents one block. By link on image you will get even bigger image, with more detalization.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a video worth? Certainly more than typing a post.

Please check out my "Coding talks" on InterSystems Developers YouTube:

1. Analysing InterSystems IRIS System Performance with Yape. Part 1: Installing Yape

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3KClL5zT6MY
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cuMLSO9NQCM
[This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

This post provides further detail on the suggestions from the DeepSee Troubleshooting Guide about what to do if a user is not able to view a listing in a DeepSee cube, but instead sees errors like this:

ERROR #5540: SQLCODE: -99 Message: User <username> is not privileged for the operation [zfindStatement+118^%SQL.DynamicStatement.1:<namespace>] (8)