Like hardware hosts, virtual hosts in public and private clouds can develop resource bottlenecks as workloads increase. If you are using and managing InterSystems IRIS instances deployed in public or private clouds, you may have encountered a situation in which addressing performance or other issues requires increasing the capacity of an instance's host (that is, vertically scaling).

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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:

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When you have more than ten thousand users in your database, it becomes time-consuming and inconvenient to assign group access rights through the standard IRIS interface. In this artilce I want to introduce you an application to automate this process.

I’ll show you how to assign and change the role lists for the users, selecting them by context, and I will also show you how to expand this application’s functionality. you know how to apply your work as an administrator and developer to the new features of the well-proven apptools software complex. With the addition of an adminLTE template, you can now quickly and easily create interface interactions for any entity and many functional modules.
The goal while developing this toolkit is to write as little JavaScript as possible as well as transfer and implement all the dynamics as much as possible in the ObjectScript.

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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.

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While the integrity of Caché and InterSystems IRIS databases is completely protected from the consequences of system failure, physical storage devices do fail in ways that corrupt the data they store. For that reason, many sites choose to run regular database integrity checks, particularly in coordination with backups to validate that a given backup could be relied upon in a disaster.

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Hi All,

With this article, I would like to show you how easily and dynamically System Alerting and Monitoring (or SAM for short) can be configured. The use case could be that of a fast and agile CI/CD provisioning pipeline where you want to run your unit-tests but also stress-tests and you would want to quickly be able to see if those tests are successful or how they are stressing the systems and your application (the InterSystems IRIS backend SAM API is extendable for your APM implementation).

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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.

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Article
· May 14, 2020 1m read
IRS Docker micro Durability

Allow limited durability for demo and development IRIS-Docker-micro-Durability During development of a container based demo I found the need to access a fresh docker
an instance of IRIS image (e.g intersystems/iris-community:2020.2.0.199.0) over and over.
To bypass loading my code repeatedly I developed this workaround.

It is a reduced variant of Docker - light weight durability

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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.

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The attached code package provides a simple implementation of a web service client that utilizes the USPS Shipping API to normalize an address.

This code requires the developer to obtain a USPS Shipping API user ID which can be obtained from the USPS shipping API website. The assigned User Id can either be passed into the web service call as a parameter or can be coded as a parameter into the Request object.

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Article
· Mar 24, 2020 2m read
BlocksExplorer map generator

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.

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Introduction

Despite the fact that InterSystems has long recommended using external backup tools, many users have opted to use the internal Online Backup facility, which is included in all distributions of InterSystems products (IRIS Data Platform, Caché, etc.). The reasons why are quite obvious:

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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
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Running Yape in a container.

2. Yape Container SQLite iostat InterSystems

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cuMLSO9NQCM
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Extracting and plotting pButtons data including timeframes and iostat.

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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)

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This week I am going to look at CPU, one of the primary hardware food groups :) A customer asked me to advise on the following scenario; Their production servers are approaching end of life and its time for a hardware refresh. They are also thinking of consolidating servers by virtualising and want to right-size capacity either bare-metal or virtualized. Today we will look at CPU, in later posts I will explain the approach for right-sizing other key food groups - memory and IO.

So the questions are:

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Article
· Feb 13, 2017 14m read
Creating custom SNMP OIDs

This post is dedicated to the task of monitoring a Caché instance using SNMP. Some users of Caché are probably doing it already in some way or another. Monitoring via SNMP has been supported by the standard Caché package for a long time now, but not all the necessary parameters are available “out of the box”. For example, it would be nice to monitor the number of CSP sessions, get detailed information about the use of the license, particular KPI’s of the system being used and such. After reading this article, you will know how to add your parameters to Caché monitoring using SNMP.

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Article
· Jul 25, 2019 1m read
Disabling an Ensemble Production

I'm not saying that this is in anyway "best practices," but I'm in a peculiar situation where I need to restrict users from starting a "retired" Ensemble Production in a namespace that's been renamed. It's still an "Ensemble-activated" namespace; we need to keep it available for Ensemble Message Viewer access ... fortunately, only for a little while.

It's a bit of a hack ...

Open the Production class in Studio and add the following classmethod:

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InterSystems Data Platform includes utilities and tools for system monitoring and alerting, however System Administrators new to solutions built on the InterSystems Data Platform (a.k.a Caché) need to know where to start and what to configure.

This guide shows the path to a minimum monitoring and alerting solution using references from online documentation and developer community posts to show you how to enable and configure the following;

  1. Caché Monitor: Scans the console log and sends emails alerts.

  2. System Monitor: Monitors system status and resources, generating notifications (alerts and warnings) based on fixed parameters and also tracks overall system health.

  3. Health Monitor: Samples key system and user-defined metrics and compares them to user-configurable parameters and established normal values, generating notifications when samples exceed applicable or learned thresholds.

  4. History Monitor: Maintains a historical database of performance and system usage metrics.

  5. pButtons: Operating system and Caché metrics collection scheduled daily.

Remember this guide is a minimum configuration, the included tools are flexible and extensible so more functionality is available when needed. This guide skips through the documentation to get you up and going. You will need to dive deeper into the documentation to get the most out of the monitoring tools, in the meantime, think of this as a set of cheat sheets to get up and running.

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In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab Workflow
  • Continuous Delivery
  • GitLab installation and configuration
  • GitLab CI/CD

In the previous article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:

  • GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
  • Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

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InterSystems products (IRIS, Caché, Ensemble) already include a built-in Apache web server. But the built-in server is designed for the development and administration tasks and thus has certain limitations. Though you may find some useful workarounds for these limitations, the more common approach is to deploy a full-scale web server for your production environment. This article describes how to set up Apache to work with InterSystems products and how to provide HTTPS access. We will be using Ubuntu, but the configuration process is almost the same for all Linux distributions.

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This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.

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Everybody has a testing environment.

Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.

-- Unknown

.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

  • Git 101
  • Git flow (development process)
  • GitLab installation
  • GitLab WorkFlow
  • GitLab CI/CD
  • CI/CD with containers

This first part deals with the cornerstone of modern software development - Git version control system and various Git flows.

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Article
· Jan 31, 2018 3m read
Container - What is a Container?

Containers

With the launch of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we provide our product even in a Docker container. But what is a container?

The fundamental container definition is that of a sandbox for a process.

Containers are software-defined packages that have some similarities to virtual machines (VM) like for example they can be executed.

Containers provide isolation without a full OS emulation. Containers are therefore much lighter than a VM.

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Continuing on with providing some examples of various storage technologies and their performance profiles, this time we looked at the growing trend of leveraging internal commodity-based server storage, specifically the new HPE Cloudline 3150 Gen10 AMD processor-based single socket servers with two 3.2TB Samsung PM1725a NVMe drives.

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