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 first 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.

As applications grow, every database eventually hits scaling limits. Whether it's storage capacity, concurrent users, query throughput, or I/O bandwidth, single-server architectures have inherent constraints. This guide explains fundamental approaches to database scalability and shows how InterSystems IRIS implements these patterns to support enterprise-scale workloads.

We'll explore two complementary scaling strategies: horizontal scaling for user volume (distributing computational load) and sharding for data volume (partitioning datasets). Understanding the general principles behind these approaches will help you make informed decisions about when and how to scale your IRIS applications.

The examples in this guide use InterSystems IRIS in Docker containers.

Monitoring your IRIS deployment is crucial. With the deprecation of System Alert and Monitoring (SAM), a modern, scalable solution is necessary for real-time insights, early issue detection, and operational efficiency. This guide covers setting up Prometheus and Grafana in Kubernetes to monitor InterSystems IRIS effectively. 

This guide assumes you already have an IRIS cluster deployed using the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator (IKO), which simplifies deployment, integration and mangement.

Why Prometheus and Grafana?

InterSystems IRIS provides extensive configurable security options, yet many developers primarily use roles and resources to secure entire tables or routines. Today, we will delve deeper. We can also secure individual columns and rows separately, but these two mechanisms operate very differently. Let's begin with the columns.

Column Security

For testing and demonstration, we will keep our table structure concise and straightforward. We have a table called "Person" in the USER namespace that contains an ID column, a date of birth column (DOB), first name, and last name. 

Security is fundamental to enterprise application development. InterSystems IRIS provides a comprehensive security framework that protects data, controls access, and ensures compliance. This guide introduces essential security features for developers new to IRIS, covering authentication, authorization, encryption, and practical implementation strategies.

Throughout this guide, we'll use Docker containers to demonstrate security configurations in a practical, reproducible environment.

Some time ago, I put together a small example to quickly deploy InterSystems IRIS instances connected via ECP using Docker.

Time passed and, like everything, it needed a bit of a refresh.

gj :: configExplorer is a new VS Code extension integrating with Server Manager and leveraging Structurizr to produce configuration diagrams of your servers.

Here's a short introductory video.

By using the InterSystems IRIS Native API for Node.js it avoids the need for any support code to be installed on the servers. This technology choice also qualifies it for entry into the current Developer Community contest.

The initial release focuses on two aspects of server configuration:

• Namespaces and databases
• ECP connectivity

Suggestions for what to add next are welcome, as is general feedback.

You may have noticed that to configure a mirror for InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and HealthShare® Health Connect there is a special requirement. I wanted to go through it step by step in this article.

This assumes you have already configured the second failover member and confirmed a successful failover member status in the mirror monitor:

Step 1: Enable HS_Services user (on backup and primary) 

Step 2: Switch to Namespace HSSYS and go to Interoperability > Configure > Credentials.

So, you checked your server and saw that IRISTEMP is growing too much. There's no need to panic. Let’s investigate the issue before your storage runs out.

Step 1: Confirm the IRISTEMP Growth Issue

Before assuming IRISTEMP is the problem, let’s check its actual size.

Check the Free Space

Run the following command in the IRIS terminal:

%SYS>do ^%FREECNT

When prompted, enter:

Database directory to show free space for (*=All)? /<your_iris_directory>/mgr/iristemp/

If the output shows very low free space, IRISTEMP is filling up your storage like an overstuffed closet

I was facing the same issue as Jerry faced when connecting IRIS to SQL server. My ODBC connection is configured to authenticate via windows authentication.

Configure IRIS ODBC connection with Windows authentication using a
 

How I fixed it for myself?

Root cause

• The SQL Server DSN was set to Windows Integrated Authentication.
• IRIS opens the ODBC connection via irisdb.exe, which runs under the IRIS Windows services’ logon account.
• My IRIS services were running as LocalSystem, so SQL saw the machine account <ORGNAME>\<ASSETID>$

Deploying new IRIS instances can be a time-consuming task, especially when setting up multiple environments with mirrored configurations.

I’ve encountered this issue many times and want to share my experience and recommendations for using Ansible to streamline the IRIS installation process. My approach also includes handling additional tasks typically performed before and after installing IRIS.

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of how Ansible works, so I won’t go into much detail on its fundamentals.

It's about an example for the External Languages Contest 2025

You get almost any information about your databases in IRIS using 
the System Management Portal. After passing several levels, you often
get a wide list of items, but the interesting ones are hard to find.

UPDATE: since version 0.0.4 of the extension was published on 2025-11-23 it is now possible to use gj :: configExplorer directly in VS Code on Windows.

In my previous article introducing gj :: configExplorer I flagged up how an apparent bug in the Windows elements of the Native API for Node.js means it's not currently available to run in VS Code on a Windows desktop. In a comment on that article I offered a workaround, but this requires a Docker-equipped Linux host you can SSH to.

If you don't have a suitable target it's now possible to leverage your local Windows Docker Desktop.

Finishing my previous example for multiple IRIS instances, I tried
to compose a local single instance version.  The step from the external
Python app to a version using embedded Python seemed to be obvious.
This was a wrong assumption, as some Python libraries just refused installation
into my local Windows-based environment.

In this tutorial, I will discuss how can you connect your IRIS data platform to sql server db .

Prereq: 

• Have ODBC driver installed in your device. You can download it from here: Download ODBC Driver for SQL Server - ODBC Driver for SQL Server | Microsoft Learn. 
• Have SQL Server and IRIS installed in your device
• Have SQL Server connection Authentication enabled in SQL server

Securing IRIS Integrations with Mutual TLS (mTLS): A Practical Guide

In today’s enterprise environments, secure communication between systems is not optional—it’s essential. Whether you're integrating InterSystems IRIS with cloud APIs, internal microservices, or third-party platforms, Mutual TLS (mTLS) offers a powerful way to ensure both ends of the connection are authenticated and encrypted.

This post walks through how to configure IRIS for mTLS and how to validate your certificates to avoid common pitfalls.

🔐 What is Mutual TLS (mTLS)?

These are the strategic plans of my example for the External Languages Contest 2025

InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can check the free disk space at any time using the system utility class: SYS.Database and query: FreeSpace.

Here's how to try it in the IRIS terminal (go to the %SYS namespace and then run it):

zn"%SYS"set

The output result example is as follows:

*In the command execution example, all databases are located on the same disk, so the free disk space (DiskFreeSpace) returns the same value.

159

If you want to specify the database directory you want to refer to, run the following:

Optimizing Performance of Apache Web Server and Web Gateway

By Patrick Jamieson, M.D., Product Technical Manager, InterSystems IRIS for Health

When working with InterSystems IRIS or IRIS for Health, an external web server like Apache2 or NGINX is essential for managing HTTP workloads, especially for FHIR servers Starting with version 2023.3, the private Apache server was removed from the installation kit (except for Community Editions and Health Connect).

InterSystems FAQ rubric

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

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

I recently helped a site investigate a problem that appeared after they upgraded their Windows instance of Caché from 2015.1 to 2017.1. A terminal session launched from the server's desktop cube was unable to run OS-level commands using the $ZF(-1) function. For instance, using the no-op command "REM" as follows:

write $zf(-1,"rem")

was returning -1, indicating that the Windows command could not be issued.

It turned out that their original 2015.

Introduction

This is a quickstart guide to IRIS for Linux systems administrators who need to be able to support the IRIS DB as well as other normal infrastructure tasks.

IRIS is a DB system from Intersystems. An IRIS DB can hold code (in the form of a Class) or data (in the form of Globals). IRIS DB are Linux files called IRIS.DAT.

Hi beloved members of the Community!

It is very common in the daily life of IRIS or Health Connect users that it is necessary to install new instances or update the ones they already have and in many cases it is not these same users who carry out the installation, but rather systems personnel who often do not take into account the particularities of the assignment of permissions necessary for the installation.

Hi, this post was initially written for Caché. In June 2023, I finally updated it for IRIS. If you are revisiting the post since then, the only real change is substituting Caché for IRIS! I also updated the links for IRIS documentation and fixed a few typos and grammatical errors. Enjoy :)

In this post, I show strategies for backing up InterSystems IRIS using External Backup with examples of integrating with snapshot-based solutions. Most solutions I see today are deployed on Linux on VMware, so a lot of the post shows how solutions integrate VMware snapshot technology as examples.

In a containerized environment, you can manage your container time via the TZ variable or via the /etc/timezone and /etc/localtime directories:

environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Paris

volumes:
    - "/etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro""/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro"

You can find complete examples here:

IRIS Community

IRISHealth_Community

IRIS production

IRISHealth production

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in GCP, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to GCP, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in GCP as subnets always span the entire region). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without using Load Balancers suggested in most other GCP reference architectures.

InterSystems FAQ rubric

It can be obtained with a List query of the %SYS.Namespace class.

1. Create a routine like this:

getnsp
   set##class

2. Run it in your terminal

The method of executing class queries introduced in this article can be applied in a variety of cases.

You can see various class queries in the class reference. For example,
　%SYS.DatabaseQuery: GetFreeSpace()　Free space in database
　%SYS.GlobalQuery: DirectoryList　           List of global names in database
　%SYS.GlobalQuery: Size

InterSystems FAQ rubric

The maximum number of namespaces that can be created in one instance is 2047. However, to use a large number of namespaces, you will need to configure memory accordingly.

The maximum number of databases (including remote databases) that can be created in one instance is 15998. Depending on the type of license, there may be restrictions on the number that can be created. For details, please refer to the following document.
Database Configuration [IRIS]
Database Configuration