#System Administration

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.

There are many storage technologies available today from various vendors. The storage technology and configuration best for your application depends on the application access patterns and workloads.

The attached document discusses the various design considerations and recommendations for various technologies. This guide is to help you during discussions with your storage vendor to determine the appropriate storage technologies and products that will work best to meet the performance goals for your applications.

Database Blocks Explorer for InterSystems Caché

Key features

InterSystems FAQ rubric

You can set the maximum size of the IRISTemp database at IRIS startup by setting a configuration parameter called MaxIRISTempSizeAtStart.

After setting, the system will truncate IRISTemp to the set value (MB) at the next IRIS startup. If the current size is less than the specified MaxIRISTempSizeAtStart, no truncation will occur. Also, if 0 is specified, truncation will not be performed, so the size will start without changing. (Default) Settings are made from the menu below.

** Revised Feb-12, 2018

While this article is about InterSystems IRIS, it also applies to Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare distributions.

Introduction

Memory is managed in pages. The default page size is 4KB on Linux systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Oracle Linux 6 introduced a method to provide an increased page size in 2MB or 1GB sizes depending on system configuration know as HugePages.

At first HugePages required to be assigned at boot time, and if not managed or calculated appropriately could result in wasted resources. As a result various Linux distributions introduced Transparent HugePages with the 2.6.38 kernel as enabled by default. This was meant as a means to automate creating, managing, and using HugePages. Prior kernel versions may have this feature as well however may not be marked as [always] and potentially set to [madvise].

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux memory management system that reduces the overhead of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) lookups on machines with large amounts of memory by using larger memory pages. However in current Linux releases THP can only map individual process heap and stack space.

IMPORTANT NOTE InterSystems no longer provides a separate InterSystems Reports Server container. To run containerized InterSystems Reports Server, use Logi Reports Server container and your InterSystems Reports Server license. Documentation.

InterSystems Reports is powered by Logi Report (formerly named JReport), a product of Logi Analytics. InterSystems Reports is supported by InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health. It provides a robust modern reporting solution that includes:

• Embedded operational reporting which can be customized by both report developers and end users.
• Pixel-perfect formatting that lets you develop highly specific form grids or other special layout elements for invoices, documents, and forms.
• Banded layouts that provide structure for aggregated and detailed data.
• Exact positioning of headers, footers, aggregations, detailed data, images, and sub-reports.
• A variety of page report types.
• Large-scale dynamic report scheduling and distribution including export to PDF, XLS, HTML, XML, and other file formats, printing, and archiving for regulatory compliance.

InterSystems Reports consists of:

• A report designer, which provides Design and Preview Tabs that enable report developers to create and preview reports with live data.
• A report server which provides end users browser-based access to run, schedule, filter, and modify reports.

From InterSystems documentation.

This article focuses on the Server part of InterSystems Reports and provides a guide on running Report Server in containers while persisting all the data.

Container Images

In this second post on containers fundamentals, we take a look at what container images are.

What is a container image?

A container image is merely a binary representation of a container.

A running container or simply a container is the runtime state of the related container image.

Please see the first post that explains what a container is.

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.

Coming back to the topic of how to minimize journals.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a feature rich environment for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a cloud offering fully capable of supporting all of InterSystems products including the latest InterSystems IRIS Data Platform. Care must be taken, as with any platform or deployment model, to ensure all aspects of an environment are considered such as performance, availability, operations, and management procedures. Specifics of each of those areas will be covered in this article.

This is a self contained class that can be run from the Intersystems Task Scheduler which records peak usage details for databases and licenses built up throughout the day and retaining 30 days history.

To schedule the task to run every hour:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule()

You can also specify your own start time, stop time, and run interval:

d ##class(Metrics.Task).Schedule(startTime, stopTime, intervalMins)

Metrics are stored in ^Metrics in the namespace that the class resides in/is run from.

I want to show my script which I use for a completion in bash, for ccontrol and csession.

With this script bash helps to available (running or down) instances to ccontrol, or in csession

file
/usr/share/bash-completion/completions/ccontrol

I am often asked by customers, vendors or internal teams to explain CPU capacity planning for large production databases running on VMware vSphere.

In summary there are a few simple best practices to follow for sizing CPU for large production databases:

• Plan for one vCPU per physical CPU core.
• Consider NUMA and ideally size VMs to keep CPU and memory local to a NUMA node.
• Right-size virtual machines. Add vCPUs only when needed.

Generally this leads to a couple of common questions:

InterSystems FAQ rubric

Here, we will introduce a sample code for registering and referencing task schedules.

①Sample of task schedule registration

*Create a task to execute do ^TEST every day at 1:00 am.