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Benjamin De Boe · Dec 27, 2022 go to post

They're on the WRC preview distribution page and I see enterprise edition ARM64 containers on ICR after logging in. We'll check why the CE containers are not (yet) on ICR for this build.

Benjamin De Boe · Nov 10, 2022 go to post

FWIW, Abstract classes inheriting from %Persistent (or even %SerialObject) do have a storage definition and can define indices too. They just can't be instantiated. To prevent the creation of a storage definition, NoExtent is the keyword to use.

Benjamin De Boe · Nov 10, 2022 go to post

For the record: it's not the Abstract-ness that leads to the index being ignored, it's the fact that the index is not defined in the primary superclass of Test.NewClass1. From secondary superclasses, only parameters, properties and methods are inherited, but not indices. So you can keep Test.NewClass Abstract, but make it inherit from %Persistent itself and then have Test.NewClass1 point to it as its primary superclass. I'll ask the doc team to make this a little clearer, as it's not obvious from this section of the doc nor the one on indices right now.

This said, @Robert Cemper 's suggested use of NoExtent is likely what you wanted to achieve.

Benjamin De Boe · Nov 10, 2022 go to post

Yes, it always behaved like this. Currently, table stats are stored as part of the class definition, based on the idea that they are often kind of static and belong with the application. That holds for certain types of applications, but in many cases it is a little too static and this is especially true for the Message Bank example here, as TuneTable cannot update class definitions for a read-only system class.

We have a project coming up to move the table stats to live with the data rather than keep them in the class definition and hope to bring that to an IRIS release in the course of 2023. In the meantime, the workaround suggested above, marking ENSLIB as writable, running TT and then marking it read-only again is reasonable (though quite a step from an official recommendation). Note that after upgrades, your ENSLIB will be overwritten and your stats will have been lost.

FYI, the last part of this article also touches on this subject

Benjamin De Boe · Nov 7, 2022 go to post

In the case of JDBC, there's also the getGeneratedKeys() method that you may find useful.

We're looking into support for a RETURNING clause for the INSERT command as a possible enhancement (Postgres' flavour of this nonstandard clause is very nice), but don't hold your breath as we have a long list of such candidate enhancements and a much shorter list of people who can work on the surprising amount of places in our codebase that would need to be updated to accommodate such a syntax extension.

Benjamin De Boe · Oct 30, 2022 go to post

There is apparently an internal-design-level distinction between UDL as an editor format and XML as an export format. We appear to have closed the case without clarifying the documentation on this point (apologies for this oversight), but I've reopened the case so we might review and reconsider the current behaviour more broadly. There's a number of additional flags like these, so it's possibly a larger change.

Benjamin De Boe · Oct 27, 2022 go to post

@Vitaliy Serdtsev is right in pointing to the resultset's metadata. That's where IRIS SQL registers column datatypes and he already pointed out that this is obviously not impacted by the presence of an ORDER BY. 

The resultset object returns the SQL-side value to ObjectScript, but on that ObjectScript side, the datatype no longer matters as it isn't strongly typed and still 1="1". Therefore, I don't think this constitutes an error.

FWIW, the reason you're seeing this is that due to the ORDER BY clause we're picking up that id value from the index' subscript rather than from the master map.

Benjamin De Boe · Oct 17, 2022 go to post

Unfortunately we're not able to offer transactions across linked tables. For one thing, the remote database may use different transaction semantics. I will request this gets clarified in our documentation, as it's not called out right now as a limitation of linked tables.

Benjamin De Boe · Aug 30, 2022 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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 go to post

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.
Benjamin De Boe · Feb 7, 2022 go to post

you're right. I didn't properly say that with "array of" I actually meant the underlying STORAGEDEFUALT = "array" behaviour. So the combination that'll be newly supported in IRIS 2022.1 is STORAGEDEFAULT = "list" with SQLPROJECTION = "table" (and table/column)

Benjamin De Boe · Feb 4, 2022 go to post

what do you mean with "for object properties too"? If you're asking whether 

Property Addresses as array of Sample.Address;

projects as a child table; yes it does. (and "list of" will support this too in 2022.1)

Benjamin De Boe · Feb 3, 2022 go to post

Sorry to hear you ran into this. The issue was also detected during recent internal testing and we're in the process of fixing it. 

Benjamin De Boe · Feb 3, 2022 go to post

A little more documentation on the SQL projection of collection properties here.

Currently the SQLPROJECTION = table option is only available for "array of" properties. In 2022.1 we intend to make this option also available for "list of" properties.

If you're interested, I can dig up a script I wrote a while ago to create a class that projects a read-only view of your "list of" property. No warranty!