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#System Administration

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System administration refers to the management of one or more hardware and software systems.

Documentation on InterSystems system administration.

Index

This is a list of all the posts in the Data Platforms’ capacity planning and performance series in order. Also a general list of my other posts. I will update as new posts in the series are added.

You will notice that I wrote some posts before IRIS was released and refer to Caché. I will revisit the posts over time, but in the meantime, Generally, the advice for configuration is the same for Caché and IRIS. Some command names may have changed; the most obvious example is that anywhere you see the ^pButtons command, you can replace it with ^SystemPerformance.

While some posts are updated to preserve links, others will be marked as strikethrough to indicate that the post is legacy. Generally, I will say, "See: some other post" if it is appropriate.

Capacity Planning and Performance Series

Generally, posts build on previous ones, but you can also just dive into subjects that look interesting.

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Question
· Nov 10, 2016
ODBC issue

Hi All,

We are accessing the InterSystems`s cache database via UNIX ODBC and displaying the data in PHP website . Recently we have upgraded the PHP version to 5.6. We are getting the nondisplayable characters (�) for only strings. But the numbers and date fields are displaying correctly.

While querying the database via ISQL everything working fine (No Special characters).

I have looked around the internet and found the PHP 5.6 changed the default character to UTF-8.

For this issue anything, we can do from cache side.

cache version :

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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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Article
· Nov 9, 2016 5m read
How the Ensemble Scheduler Works

The Ensemble Scheduler is used for automatically turning on and off business hosts at certain dates and times. You could use it if, for example, you wanted to only run a business host from 9am to 5pm every day. Conversely, if you want do to trigger an event to occurr at a specific time, for example, a job running at 1am to batch up and send off all the previous day's transactions in one file, we recommend other methods such as the Task Manager.

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Article
· Nov 8, 2016 4m read
Returning Disk Space to File Systems

This is the first article in a series discussing how to regain disk space from Caché databases at the operating system level. This introductory article discusses Caché database growth and gives an overview of various methods you can use to return unused disk space that is allocated to database files back to the file system. But before we talk about returning space to the file system, let’s first review how does it get allocated in the first place.

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Importance and Collection of Exact Version Information ($zv / $zversion)
The explanation of:
- why collecting $zv is important (The WHY),
- what the components of $zv mean (The WHAT),
- and how to collect $zv (The HOW).
(The Ultimate $zv Guide to the ISC Galaxy in large, friendly letters)
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I'm pleased to see this in the documentation of the just-published 2017.1 Field Test of Ensemble:

"In certain circumstances, it is useful to create namespaces that are not enabled for Ensemble. In this release you can do this by clearing the Make this an Ensemble namespace checkbox when creating a new namespace. "

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InterSystems Official
· Nov 7, 2016
Feature Tracker in 2017.1

Starting with the Field Test of 2017.1 InterSystems products will include Feature Tracker. It is enabled by default during the Field Test and is explained more fully in the product documentation included below. Information collected by Feature Tracker is limited to technology usage information and instance identification. This tool has been carefully crafted to not transmit sensitive information related to customer applications or data.

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As per the documentation of QueueCountAlert:
Number of messages on this item's queue needed to trigger an Alert message to be sent. Note that no further alerts will be sent unless the number of messages on the queue drops below 80% of this number and then rises again to this number.
Note that this alert will be sent even if AlertOnError is False.
Zero means no alerts of this type will be sent.

Now, the question is,
If QueueCountAlert is set to 10, and the queue size become 11 we will be getting email once.

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Here are a few examples of conversions and operations you might need, along with links to documentation where you can learn more.

At the time I wrote this, Eastern Daylight Time was in effect for my Caché system.

How Caché keeps the time and date

Caché has a simple time format, with a longer range of recognized dates compared to some other technologies.

The current time is maintained in a special variable $HOROLOG ($H):

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Question
· Oct 30, 2016
ISCAgent debug

Good day!
Is there an opportunity to debug the ISCAgent behaviour (in Linux)? ISCAgent uses /etc/iscagent/iscagent.conf as configuration file, but in docs I've found a description only for two parameters (port number and interface - http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...). Other parameters I can see by running /usr/local/etc/cachesys/ISCAgentCtrl status:

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Question
· Oct 19, 2016
Upgrade to Ensemble 2016

Hi All,

We are Upgrading the Application from Ensemble 2009 to 2016.1. We have imported the user, Roles and Resources.
But the Sql Tables and Sql Procedures are not being visible in Management portal -> Security Management -> User.
Please give me a solution or basics steps for importing those.

Thanks,
Manoj J

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When running the built in Ensemble Purge task (Ens.Util.Tasks.Purge) there are three parameters DaysToKeep, BodiesToo, and KeepIntegrity. This article focuses on the KeepIntegrity boolean parameter, but more information about running this task can be found here:

http://docs.intersystems.com/latest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=...

KeepIntegrity determines which Ensemble Messages are marked for deletion within the time specified by DaysToKeep.

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Here you have an easy way to write and execute COS code from your unix scripts. This way one does not need to write routines or even open Studio or Atelier. It can be an option for simple and small actions for instance things like installation tasks or compiling.

See sample bash script (compile.sh) to compile classes:

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The goal of this writing was to illustrate how to restore backup before the patch would be applied. The alert notes that:

The risk can be avoided by applying journals from the beginning of the journal file that was switched to at the start of the backup, rather than accepting the default of starting from the journal marker position.

Having non-patched Caché 2015.1.4, I ran sample database backup and restore just to get where I should answer "No". Collecting journal info from the backup log:

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This text is a continuation of my article where I explained the structure a Caché database. In this article, I described the types of blocks, connections between them and their relation to globals. The article was purely theoretical. I made a project that helps visualize the block tree - and this article will explain how it works in great detail.

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One of the great availability and scaling features of Caché is Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP). With consideration during application development distributed processing using ECP allows a scale out architecture for Caché applications. Application processing can scale to very high rates from a single application server to the processing power of up to 255 application servers with no application changes.

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Good Morning and thanks in advance for all replies. I have created a PowerShell script for backing up CACHE and all related files to be run on a nightly basis. My script works as long as the Unknownuser has %all access which is not acceptable in our production environment. I have tried every format I can thank of to get the script to use a specific id with no luck. How can I get this command to run under a specific id?

..\bin\cache -s. -U%SYS "##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze() <d:\backup\login.scr"

The file just has

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After reading Stephen Wilson's article "Windows 7 performs shutdown too fast for Cache to close and so it gets forced down" I've recalled another solution that was based on Local Group Policy, which allows to control extra actions that should occur on computer startup or shutdown. How to add a computer shutdown script is well documented in MS Technet article.

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