Article
· Sep 22, 2016 3m read
Windows write caching

(This article was reviewed in February 2021. It is still relevant to Caché-based installations and similarly applies to IRIS-based installations.)

This article discusses the Windows write caching setting which can leave systems vulnerable to data loss or corruption in the event of power loss or operating system crash. The setting is on by default in some Windows configurations.

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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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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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C:\data\backup.bat :

C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\bin\cache -s"C:\InterSystems\Ensemble\Mgr" -U%%SYS ##Class(Backup.General).ExternalFreeze() <C:\data\login.scr

echo %ERRORLEVEL%

rem note that we need to check errorlevel from highest to lowest here....

if errorlevel 5 goto OK

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Hello everyone,

I'm trying to authenticate a user(Health Share clinician) from a Java Application.

I 'm already connected to Caché and able to run SQL commands.

My question is: How can I authenticate a user using only SQL? In fact, what I want is verify if the users exists in the base and if the given password is the same used in Health Share.

There is a column 'password' in Security.users table but I'm not able to see its content, even so, I don't know which hash function to use to compare with.

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Problem:

A file-based business service uses a local path on a Linux machine that is actually a mounted CIFS share. The mount is "soft" and is designed to not cache data, etc. There are times however when the remote system offering up the share (it's a Windows machine I believe) gets bounced or otherwise hung up the business service in the Ensemble production just hangs.

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I use DataGrip (JDBC client) to query Caché server via JDBC.

The problem I encountered, is that if I wait 10 or more minutes between queries I get an error:

[08S01][461] Communication link failure: Socket closed

To fix that I need to disconnect and connect to server again. Is there a JDBC timeout setting somewhere I can change?

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Article
· May 26, 2016 1m read
Windows, Caché and virus scanners

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.

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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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A short post for now to answer a question that came up. In post two of this series I included graphs of performance data extracted from pButtons. I was asked off-line if there is a quicker way than cut/paste to extract metrics for mgstat etc from a pButtons .html file for easy charting in Excel.

See: - Part 2 - Looking at the metrics we collected

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Article
· Aug 26, 2016 8m read
Enterprise Monitor and HealthShare

Enterprise Monitor is a component of Ensemble and can help organizations monitor multiple productions running on different namespaces within the same instance or namespaces running on multiple instances.

Documentation can be found at:

http://docs.intersystems.com/ens20161/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=EMONITOR_all#EMONITOR_enterprise

In Ensemble 2016.1 there were changes made to make this utility work with HealthShare environments.

This article will:

  • Show how to set up Enterprise Monitor for HealthShare sites
  • Show some features of Enterprise Monitor
  • Show some features of Enterprise Message Viewer

For this article, I used the following version of HealthShare:

Cache for Windows (x86-64) 2016.1 (Build 656U) Fri Mar 11 2016 17:42:42 EST [HealthShare Modules:Core:14.02.2415 + Linkage Engine:14.02.2415 + Patient Index:14.02.2415 + Clinical Viewer:14.02.2415 + Active Analytics:14.02.2415]

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Hi!

I am not system admin. But it used to be very simple to install CSP Gateway on an apache system on Linux with Apache installed. I used to run the CSP Gateway installation program and after it was done, all I had to do was fine tune some configurations on CSP Gateway portal on http://<ip>/csp/bin/Systems/Module.cxw and I was up and running.

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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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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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Mirror Outage Procedures

Caché mirroring is a reliable, inexpensive and easy to implement high availability and disaster recovery solution for Caché and Ensemble-based applications. This article provides an overview of recommended procedures for dealing with a variety of planned and unplanned mirror outage scenarios.

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Question
· Apr 28, 2016
Cache Installation Issue

Hi,

Our Cache server(version 5.0.15) has recently crashed. We are in the process of recovery. We had replaced the server's hard disk and trying to install the cache(5.0.15) But getting the following error. Any body show some light on the issue.

CctrlInstallStartCP( CACHE ) failed! Return value: 1
CctrlGetLastError() returned:

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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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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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