#System Administration

Introduction

InterSystems FAQ rubric

There is no need to recompile the routines after the version upgrade, but since the version update overwrites %SYS, user-created INT and OBJ format routines (*.INT,*.OBJ) in %SYS will be deleted. Therefore, you need to be careful.

MAC, INT and OBJ routines with the following names are not deleted.

%Z*.INT, %z*.INT, Z*.INT,z*.INT
%Z*.OBJ, %z*.OBJ, Z*.OBJ,z*.OBJ

Please note that classes/CSPs need to be compiled after upgrading.

I have seen a customer problem recently where the use of a virus scanner running over Caché databases was causing intermittent application slow downs and bad user response times.

This is a surprisingly common problem, so this short post is just a reminder to exclude key Caché components from your virus scanning.

Generally virus scanning must exclude the CACHE.DAT database files and Caché binaries. If an anti-virus is scanning CACHE.DATs and InterSystems files then system performance will be significantly impacted.

Last week I was onsite with a new customer of ours, implementing Deltanji to give them control of their development and deployment cycle. One particularly satisfying part of the visit was seeing their pleasure at how their production class now records its changes over time, allowing them to quickly diff the versions and see what configuration items have been added or what settings altered. ​

InterSystems FAQ rubric

To enable Interoperability functionality after creating a namespace, use the EnableNamespace method of the %EnsembleMgr class:

do ##class(%EnsembleMgr).EnableNamespace()

An installation or upgrade of Caché, Ensemble, or HealthShare on Windows could fail with the titled error if a newer version of the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2013 (x86) or (x64) is installed instead of version 12.0.30501.

Often InterSystems technology architect team is asked about recommended storage arrays or storage technologies. To provide this information to a wider audience as reference, a new series is started to provide some of the results we have encountered with various storage technologies. As a general recommendation, all-flash storage is highly recommended with all InterSystems products to provide the lowest latency and predictable IOPS capabilities.

The first in the series was the most recently tested Netapp AFF A300 storage array. This is middle-tier type storage array with several higher models above it. This specific A300 model is capable of supporting a minimal configuration of only a few drives to hundreds of drives per HA pair, and also capable of being clustered with multiple controller pairs for tens of PB's of disk capacity and hundreds of thousands of IOPS or higher.

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

InterSystems FAQ rubric

The Web/CSP Gateway management page is typically configured so that it cannot be accessed from client machines.

To access from any client, do the following:

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:

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:

InterSystems FAQ rubric

On Linux, use the following steps to delete an instance of InterSystems IRIS (hereinafter referred to as IRIS).

(1) Stop the IRIS instance you want to uninstall using iris stop

# iris stop <instance name>

(2) Delete the instance information using the following command

I was approached recently by and end use who wanted to perform analysis of their databases and see how they could save some space by picking data good for deletion without harming the application. As part of investigation, they wanted to know sizes of globals within datasets. This can be achieved by various means but all of them provide data in text form only.

I thought I might be a good tool for database administrators in general - to see global sizes in a graphical way.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can see the free available space for the database using the radio button "Free Space View" in Management Portal: System Operation > Databases.

And it can be obtained programmatically by the FreeSpace query of the system class SYS.Database.