I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

• CR+LF is typical for Windows
• LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
• CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

The topic of for/while loop performance in Caché ObjectScript came up in discussion recently, and I'd like to share some thoughts/best practices with the rest of the community. While this is a basic topic in itself, it's easy to overlook the performance implications of otherwise-reasonable approaches.

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 :)

Have you ever been editing files in VS Code, but needed to check a global value or run a few ObjectScript commands? Now you can, with no setup required! If you have vscode-objectscript extension version 2.10.0 or later and are connected to InterSystems IRIS 2023.2 or later, you can now open a terminal connection to your server, regardless of where it's located.

There are three ways to open this new terminal:

Introduction

This 'feature' have been around for a long time, but I don't see any articles on it so I thought I would make everyone aware.

This time I want to talk about something not specific to InterSystems IRIS, but that I think is important if you want to work with Docker and your server at work is a PC or laptop with Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise.

As you likely know, containers technology comes basically from Linux world and, nowadays, is on Linux hosts were it shows maximum potential. Those who use Windows on a normal basis see that both, Microsoft and Docker, have done important efforts during these last years that allow us to run containers based on Linux images on our Windows system in a really easy way... but it's something not supported for production systems and, this is the big problem, is not reliable if we want to keep persistent data outside of containers, in the host system,... mostly due to the big differences between Windows and Linux file systems. In the end, Docker for Windows itself uses a small linux virtual machine (MobiLinux) to run the containers... it does it transparently for the windows user... and it works perfectly well if, as I said, you don't require that your databases survive longer than the container...

Well,...let's get to the point,... the point is that many times, to avoid issues and simplify, we need a full Linux system and, if our server is based on Windows, the only way of having it is through a virtual machine. At least till WSL2 in Windows is released, but that will be another story and sure it'll take a bit of time to become robust enough.

In this article, I'll tell you, step by step, how to install an environment where you'll be able to work, if you need it, with Docker containers on an Ubuntu system in your Windows server. Let's go...

Caché offers a number of methods for going through a collection and doing something with its elements. The easiest method uses a while-loop and lets you fulfill the task in an imperative manner. The developer needs to take care of the iterator, jumping to the next element and checking if the loop is within the collection.

There's an easy new way to add certificate authority (CA) certificates to your SSL/TLS configurations on InterSystems IRIS 2019.1 (and 2018.1.2) on Windows and Mac. You can ask IRIS to use the operating system's certificate store by entering:

%OSCertificateStore

in the field for "File containing Trusted Certificate Authority X.509 certificate(s)". Here's an image of how to do this in the portal:

the useful content is in the replies
showing the use of $SYSTEM.OBJ.ValidateIndices()

This short article was motivated by a problem of one of my customers. They use Ensemble to integrate many systems, some of them use just plain files.

So they naturally selected File Outbound Adapter to write into target file. Things were running smoothly for years, until recently, when the volume of data being written to the file reached large size of tens of megabytes. The operation took around half an hour to complete, causing timing problems where subsequent operations within the process had to wait, and third party system was not happy to wait so long.

During my search for a snapshot of a persistent object,
I met a feature that I would like to share as it could be useful in some special situations.
My trigger was to have a before- and an after-image during unit testing.

In the business world, every second counts, and having high-performing applications is essential for streamlining our business processes. We understand the significance of crafting efficient algorithms, measurable through the big O notation.

This post is the direct result of working with an InterSystems customer who came to me with the following problem:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM MyCustomTable

Takes 0.005 seconds, total 2300 rows. However: