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Benjamin De Boe · Aug 30, 2022

Hi Jun, those sandboxes are controlled environments set up for specific courses. There isn't really a course corresponding to this demo / subject, so unfortunately no single-click-install this time. 

Once you have a running instance of IRIS, setting it up through the commands described above shouldn't be that big a deal:

do $system.OBJ.ImportDir("/path/to/downloaded/isc-iknow-setanalysis","*.xml","c",,1)

do ##class(Demo.SetAnalysis.Utils).CreateRestWebApp()
Benjamin De Boe · Aug 22, 2022

Thanks @Vitaliy Serdtsev 

Indeed, that method will be deprecated shortly, in favour of CREATE TABLE AS SELECT, which is new in 2021.1 and part of the SQL standard. Both this command and the $SYSTEM utility method will create a physical copy of the data, so a real SQL table that's not kept in sync in the way a SQL view is. If the latter is what you need, don't bother with creating it as a table.

Note that in a more recent version we also support the CREATE OR REPLACE syntax for a bunch of additional statements (including CREATE FUNCTION, CREATE PROCEDURE, ...) and CREATE IF NOT EXISTS for things that actually contain data such as tables.

Benjamin De Boe · Jul 29, 2022

yeah, while I appreciate @Renato Banzai 's creativity in the above article, I can't resist to make a plug for our %Stream classes that can take care of very large strings. Also, starting 2021.2, Stream data is compressed by default, which can easily save you 80% on storage for content such as XML. I have a couple of utilities here that complement this feature by allowing you to compress old stream data in-place.

Benjamin De Boe · Jul 29, 2022

Cool stuff! For this age-old iKnow demo I used import.io to scrape a bunch of hotel reviews from the web, but it was pretty crude and server-based, so impossible to include in the demo repo. I've heard of beautifulsoup before, but never considered revisiting that data sourcing piece of my demo now that we can use it directly through Embedded Python.

Benjamin De Boe · Apr 29, 2022

I'm not sure what you mean with "linear cost pagination", but as soon as your query plan gets more complex than reading a single stream (and especially when sorting) there is upfront work before you can start reading the first row so any pagination of that final result simply cannot be linear. 

That small disclaimer aside, "customizable filtering and sorting" sound like application-level features you'd apply on top of the result set returned by SQL and the %ScrollableResultSet class offers something along those lines. If you're looking for server-side support, IRIS SQL currently only supports the TOP clause, but we have support for LIMIT / OFFSET semantics queued for development.

Benjamin De Boe · Apr 8, 2022

Where Oracle uses the FROM DUAL pseudo-table, IRIS will just do without a FROM clause altogether for cases where you just want to select a single row of constant expressions. The following statement should work:

INSERT INTO mytable (column1, column2, column_n)
  SELECT expr1, expr2, expr_n UNION ALL
   SELECT expr1, expr2, expr_n;
Benjamin De Boe · Apr 8, 2022

As of IRIS 2021.1, we allow users to create their own aggregate functions. Perhaps there's a beautiful community contribution in there? :-)

You could build something simple where you just stuff all values in a temporary global (the name of which you pass as a state) and sort them (using $sortbegin/$sortend), maintaining a count and then in the FINALIZE method gather the actual median value.

Two caveats:

  • don't bother implementing a MERGE function. We don't support parallel execution just yet.
  • in some query execution plans, the FINALIZE method may be called more than once (e.g. if the aggregate is used in the SELECT list and say a HAVING clause). So you may want to cache your result somewhere (a PPG will do as this is in the last single-process mile of query processing, typically mere milliseconds apart)

We'll be removing these annoyances in a future version

Benjamin De Boe · Apr 8, 2022

Oliver already pointed you at the key setting for this, but I thought I'd include a snippet from and link to the corresponding doc as well

If Source has a foreign key public RowID, and you want Destination to have the same foreign key relationship, you must define Destination with the ALLOWIDENTITYINSERT=1 parameter. When defining Destination as a persistent class, specify Parameter ALLOWIDENTITYINSERT=1;. When using CREATE TABLE to define Destination, specify %CLASSPARAMETER ALLOWIDENTITYINSERT=1. If a table is defined as ALLOWIDENTITYINSERT=1, this setting cannot be changed by the SetOption("IdentityInsert") method.

Benjamin De Boe · Apr 7, 2022

That would be through calling %Next() right away. The way how our query code works is to walk through results and tell you when it runs out of rows to pass back. 

Our online documentation has a feedback button that makes your comments immediately find their way to the doc writers. They really appreciate suggestions and usually turn them around quite quickly :-)

Benjamin De Boe · Apr 7, 2022

Have you taken a look at DataMove? DataMove supports live environments, ensuring any operations to the global (subscripts) being moved are propagated along to the new location without requiring downtime.

I understand it might not yet be available on the releases you currently have deployed, but would be interested in learning more about features that might be missing or generally experiences from doing this on production systems. 

Benjamin De Boe · Apr 7, 2022

This is expected behaviour. for a SELECT statement, %Execute() (or %ExecDirect()) will set %SQLCODE to 0 if the statement was successfully executed and ready to return rows, or an error code if the execution went wrong. It's through the use of %Next() that it will figure out whether there are any rows left. The first %Next() call on such a resultset will return 0 and at the same time set %SQLCODE to 100. This behaviour is similar and perhaps even more visible in the case of %ROWCOUNT for SELECT statements, which increases with every call to %Next(). See also the docs for %Next() (second bullet)

The simple reason for this is that we're not building the whole result set upfront, but rather "get ready" to iterate through it with %Next() calls, as users may only be interested in the first few rows. Some call this a lazy execution model, but I prefer the term efficient :-). Of course, for DML statements such as UPDATE and DELETE, the %ROWCOUNT is known immediately upon execution, as there is no result set to scan through

Benjamin De Boe · Mar 21, 2022

Also interested to see submissions / ideas on handling really BIG globals. DataMove is a powerful feature for moving data from one database to another in a live environment, but it operates at a fairly low level. Adding a layer around it for easy archiving of table data, an interface to keep track of (potentially large numbers of) subscript-level mappings, etc.. would be examples of helpful utilities in the big global space. 

FWIW, we have several roadmap items for IRIS in this area, but I won't go into detail on them as it's much more exciting and informative for us to learn about the problems you are seeing and the solutions you'd propose to them :-)

Benjamin De Boe · Feb 14, 2022

Two small notes:

  • The difference between %Dictionary.IndexDefinition and %Dictionary.CompiledIndex is that the former has all the indices you defined in that class itself, and the latter also the ones it got through class inheritance. Obviously, you can only delete the ones in the former list, unless you're sure you're not accidentally dropping one that still matters for another subclass of the same parent in which it was defined.
  • If you use %DeleteId() to drop an index, you'll need to call %PurgeIndices() for those indices first (iianm) and recompile the affected class(es) afterwards. A slightly more elegant approach would be to call DROP INDEX for each entry in the list. That'll take care of the recompiling and data-dropping for you.