#InterSystems IRIS

Data privacy regulations such as GDPR, LGPD, and HIPAA demand that organizations know exactly where Personally Identifiable Information (PII) lives inside their databases. Yet in practice, most teams rely on manual inventories, tribal knowledge, or external scanning tools that require data to leave the database engine — a process that itself creates privacy and security risks.

This article presents an MVP that takes a different approach: it runs PII detection inside InterSystems IRIS using Embedded Python, analyzing data where it lives and never exporting it to an external process.

When managing critical healthcare data through an integration engine you want to know the moment a queue starts backing up or a service drops. 

Unfortunately, this usually leads to an email inbox stuffed full of notifications that can sometimes seem impossible to maintain.

Well, I’ve not solved that problem. 

But I have created something that could help...

InterSystems IRIS globals are one of the platform's core strengths: they store hierarchical data in a direct, ordered, and efficient structure. But when working from Python, manipulating globals can sometimes feel closer to a low-level API than to the natural habits of the language.

The iris-global-reference project provides a Python layer on top of IRIS globals. Its goal is simple: make access to globals more readable, more idiomatic, and easier to integrate into modern Python code, without hiding the underlying hierarchical model.

What is wrong with the *inc file code below:

#define ArrayToString(%array,%out,%del)      set %out="" for { ##continue
                                                                                   set key=$order(%array("")) quit:key="" ##continue
                                                                                   set %out=%out_%del_key ##continue
                                                                               } quit

Compilation at calling classmethod as : Set tQStr = $$$ArrayToString(pQArray,tQStr,"##") brings error as:

I need to analyse and improve the performance on some old SQL statements.

One statement uses NVL in the WHERE clause (no wonder why it's slow) but I still have to improve the performance and the data really needs to be the same when returned.

SELECT *
FROM TOURHead, TOURFIND, SGNRFIND, TNRHead
WHERE TOURHead.cl = '123'
AND TOURHead.cl = TOURFIND.cl
AND TOURHead.TOURNR = TOURFIND.TOURNR
AND TOURFIND.cl =* SGNRFIND.cl
AND TOURFIND.SGNR    =* SGNRFIND.SGNR
AND TOURFIND.cl = TNRHead.cl
AND NVL(TOURFIND.TNR, SGNRFIND.TNR) = TNRHead.TNR;

Really hope someone can help me with this one.

Many organizations that operate systems built on legacy technology stacks are facing significant support and maintenance complexities. They are eager to modernize, but the transition is usually prohibitively complex and expensive. These challenges apply to virtually any legacy tech, while InterSystems-based systems have their own unique nuances.

Key modernization challenges include:

• Refactoring massive amounts of code, including identifying and removing obsolete "dead code."
• Managing complex business logic accumulated organically over decades.

Hello, community.

I've been working with Intersystem Caché for two years, and right away I was excited about the rich ecosystem that Caché provides. However, I was disappointed with calls using #call, and I understand that it was a limitation of the time. Well, the frustration is that #call returns null by default, meaning an AJAX request is executed, but there's no hook to retrieve the return from that request. The only way to retrieve the data from that request is by building a callback on the server side using &js<>.

Introduction

In healthcare interoperability environments, InterSystems Health Connect typically contains critical components such as productions, business processes, operations, services, utility classes, routines, and other ObjectScript artifacts. Traditionally, many deployments of these components have been done manually, by copying classes, importing XML, or using administrative tools from the management portal.

In our previous article, we explored the basics of unit testing in IRIS and the ways to apply it to a REST API. We even figured out how to test logic before finalizing network configurations and authentication, allowing us to focus solely on testing the API contents. Today, we will build upon that foundation and elevate our unit testing strategy by using another tool: %Populate .

At first glance, the %Populate class appears to be very simple. You can create a class that extends both %Persistent and %Populate and inherit a Populate method designed to generate randomized records.

For those of you that weren't at READY last week, you may have missed the exciting announcement that the Early Access Program for AI Hub is officially open. It was announced during an amazing demo from @Benjamin De Boe and @Jeff Fried, I recommend catching up with this demo when the recording is released!  I had the opportunity to play with AI Hub in advance, and thought I might share an introduction with the community.

Hi, Community!

Have you tried using serial objects in InterSystems IRIS? Explore some of the benefits and see how to start using them:

Using Serial Objects for Embedded Data Modeling

Hello everyone,

The Certification Team of InterSystems Learning Services is excited to announce the release of our new InterSystems IRIS SQL Professional exam. It is now available for purchase and scheduling in the InterSystems exam catalog. This exam is geared towards IRIS SQL experts, and it deals with a variety of advanced IRIS SQL topics that you can find in the exam page.

Introduction

Today, coding assistants like Claude, GitHub Copilot and Cursor have transformed the way developers write code. However, these tools are limited by being isolated from the systems and data sources that developers work with daily. This limitation can be overcome through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard designed to connect AI assistants to external data sources and tools in a secure and standardized way.

In this review article, we'll explore the current state-of-the-art regarding the MCP within the InterSystems ecosystem.

Hi,

I'm trying to run an SQL against Backup.Task table.

There is this class:

Class Backup.Task

documented here:

How can I remove UNIQUE NOT NULL from an existing column via DDL?

I currently have a table in production that was originally created via DDL, where the column was defined as UNIQUE NOT NULL:

CREATE TABLE database.Books ( ID %Library.UniqueIdentifier PRIMARY KEY, TagExternal VARCHAR('') UNIQUE NOT NULL,  

I now need to change this column so that it is no longer UNIQUE and no longer NOT NULL, making it equivalent to:

TagExternal VARCHAR(''),

Was wondering if anyone had a Dynamic way to see if a Global is still being used by a Class File. 

We have been monitoring our Global Size recently, and I am trying to find problematic Class files that are not being cleaned up or used appropriately. I have come across some globals that do not seem to have a Class attached to them anymore, and instead of deleting globals 1 by 1, I was looking for a way that we could dynamically do this since the globals have data that is stale in them.

Thanks

Scott

Hi! 
We are working on containerizing our IRIS product. We want to extract the message log that is shown in the terminal, but if possible, we want to format the output as JSON and include some extra fields from the instance to enhance our monitoring. Is this possible?
Any guide or example about it?
Thanks!

I am configuring a set of Linux (RHEL 9) servers to operate as an IRIS 2025.1 mirror set. Mirroring traffic is using TLS, so each IRIS server has the necessary TLS configurations. However installation of ISCAgent on the dedicated arbiter host didn't make any mention of TLS or certificates. Nor did I find anything about this when searching IRIS documentation.

Am I missing something? Does the traffic between the IRIS hosts and the arbiter host use TLS? Should I be installing any certs on the arbiter host to facilitate secure communication?

Abstract

Solar irradiance forecasting is critical for grid stability in photovoltaic (PV) power plants. This article replicates and extends the methodology of Lara-Benítez et al. (2023) "Short-term solar irradiance forecasting in streaming with deep learning" replacing the original offline simulation with a fully operational streaming pipeline built on InterSystems IRIS. We leverage IRIS Interoperability Productions as the streaming backbone, Embedded Python to run MLP, LSTM, and CNN deep learning models, and IntegratedML as an AutoML baseline.

Despite the fact that LOCK (docs) is a foundational part of InterSystems IRIS, responsible for concurrency, there is not a lot of discussion on the Developer Community about it. Which is understandable, considering it's stable and fairly low-level command. In this article, I will show a simple example of how to use locks with interoperability.

As an experiment in agentic coding in ObjectScript I'm using VS Code to try and create an implementation of an SFTP server.

SFTP is built on top of SSH, so the first phase involves implementing an SSH server. While working on the KEX part of that the agent (using GPT-5.3-Codex) reported:

1. IRIS has what we already need for signing and hashing: RSASHASign, RSASHAVerify, RSAGetLastError, SHAHash, SHA1Hash, SHA3Hash.
2. It does not list a Diffie-Hellman key exchange or modular exponentiation API in %SYSTEM.Encryption.

It then offered these options:

1. Keep using IRIS APIs for cert/key/sign/hash.