With InterSystems IRIS 2022.2, we introduced Columnar Storage as a new option for persisting your IRIS SQL tables that can boost your analytical queries by an order of magnitude. The capability is marked as experimental in 2022.2 and 2022.3, but will "graduate" to a fully supported production capability in the upcoming 2023.1 release.

The product documentation and this introductory video, already describe the differences between row storage, still the default on IRIS and used throughout our customer base, and columnar table storage and provide high-level guidance on choosing the appropriate storage layout for your use case. In this article, we'll elaborate on this subject and share some recommendations based on industry-practice modelling principles, internal testing, and feedback from Early Access Program participants.

With IRIS 2021.1, we released a significant revision our SQL utilities API at %SYSTEM.SQL. Yes, that's a while ago now, but last week a customer asked a few questions about this and then @Tom Woodfin applied gentle mental pressure ;-) to make me describe the rationale of these changes in a little more detail on the Developer Community. So here we go!

This is the third article in our short series around innovations in IRIS SQL that deliver a more adaptive, high-performance experience for analysts and applications querying relational data on IRIS. It may be the last article in this series for 2021.2, but we have several more enhancements lined up in this area. In this article, we'll dig a little deeper into additional table statistics we're starting to gather in this release: Histograms

The 2021.2 release of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform includes many exciting new features for fast, flexible and secure development of your mission-critical applications. Embedded Python definitely takes the limelight (and for good reason!), but in SQL we've also made a massive step forward towards a more adaptive engine that gathers detailed statistical information about your table data and exploits it to deliver the best query plans. In this brief series of articles, we'll take a closer at three elements that are new in 2021.2 and work together towards this goal, starting with Run Time Plan Choice.

It's hard to figure out the right order to talk about these (you can't imagine how often I've reshuffled them in writing this article!) because they fit together in such a nice way. As such, feel free to go on a limb and read these in random order .

InterSystems IRIS 2020.1 brings a broad set of improved and new capabilities to help build important applications. In addition to the many significant performance improvements accrued through 2019.1 and 2020.1, we are introducing one of our biggest changes in recent SQL history: the Universal Query Cache. This article provides more context on its impact to SQL-based applications at a technical level.

With the release of InterSystems IRIS, we're also making available a nifty bit of software that allows you to get the best out of your InterSystems IRIS cluster when working with Apache Spark for data processing, machine learning and other data-heavy fun. Let's take a closer look at how we're making your life as a Data Scientist easier, as you're probably already facing tough big data challenges already, just from the influx of job offers in your inbox!

If you've worked with iKnow domain definitions, you know they allow you to easily define multiple data locations iKnow needs to fetch its data from when building a domain. If you've worked with DeepSee cube definitions, you'll know how they tie your cube to a source table and allow you to not just build your cube, but also synchronize it, only updating the facts that actually changed since the last time you built or synced the cube. As iKnow also supports loading from non-table data sources like files, globals and RSS feeds, the same tight synchronization link doesn't come out of the box. In this article, we'll explore two approaches for modelling DeepSee-like synchronization from table data locations using callbacks and other features of the iKnow domain definition infrastructure.

This article contains the tutorial document for a Global Summit academy session on Text Categorization and provides a helpful starting point to learn about Text Categorization and how iKnow can help you to implement Text Categorization models. This document was originally prepared by Kerry Kirkham and Max Vershinin and should work based on the sample data provided in the SAMPLES namespace.

In previous articles on iKnow, we described a number of demo applications (iKnow demo apps parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) that are either part of the regular kit or can be easily installed from GitHub. All of those applications assumed you already had your iKnow domain ready, with your data of interest loaded and ready for exploration. In this article, we'll shed more light on how exactly you can get to that stage: how you define and then build a domain.