Discussion Benjamin De Boe · Dec 4, 2025

Hi,

We're working on new capabilities to help you build Agents and AI applications faster with InterSystems IRIS. In order to better understand which entry points and development methodologies would help you most, we've created this brief survey: Building AI solutions with InterSystems IRIS. 

Filling it in should not take much more than 5 minutes, and your feedback on this exciting topic will help us fine tune our designs and prioritize the right features.

Thanks in advance!
benjamin
 

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Discussion Benjamin De Boe · Oct 29, 2025

Hi, 

We very much appreciate the interest in the Developer Community for IRIS Vector Search and hope our technology has helped many of you build innovative applications or advanced your R&D efforts. With a dedicated index, integrated embeddings generation, and deep integration with our SQL engine now available in InterSystems IRIS, we're looking at the next frontier, and would love to hear your feedback on the technology to prioritize our investments.

If you used Vector Search already and could spare 10 minutes of your busy schedule, here's a brief survey on your use of the technology so far,

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Jun 19, 2025 10m read

This article describes a significant enhancement of how InterSystems IRIS deals with table statistics, a crucial element for IRIS SQL processing, in the 2025.2 release. We'll start with a brief refresher on what table statistics are, how they are used, and why we needed this enhancement. Then, we'll dive into the details of the new infrastructure for collecting and saving table statistics, after which we'll zoom in onto what the change means in practice for your applications. We'll end with a few additional notes on patterns enabled by the new model, and look forward to the follow-on phases of this initial delivery.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Mar 12, 2025

Hi,

We’re launching an Early Access Program for an upcoming Table Partitioning feature that will help IRIS customers manage very large tables, and distribute row data and associated indices across databases and storage tiers. Table Partitioning cuts deep into the core of IRIS relational data management, so we want to make sure we get things right through working with a few engaged customers who can provide feedback on the initial deliverables, and fine-tune as needed.

If you are working with very large relational datasets, looking for more operational efficiency, and willing to roll up your

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Jun 6, 2024 4m read

We're excited to continue to roll out new features to InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, such as the new Vector Search capability that was first released with InterSystems IRIS 2024.1. Cloud SQL is a cloud service that offers exactly that: SQL access in the cloud. That means you'll be using industry-standard driver technologies such as JDBC, ODBC, and DB-API to connect to this service and access your data. The documentation describes in proper detail how to configure the important driver-level settings, but doesn't cover specific third-party tools as - as you can imagine - there's an infinite number of them.

In this article, we'll complement that reference documentation with more detailed steps for a popular third-party data visualization tool that several of our customers use to access IRIS-based data: Microsoft Power BI.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Jan 11, 2024

InterSystems is pleased to announce the General Availability of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL and InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML, two foundational services for developing cloud-native solutions powered by the proven, enterprise-class performance and reliability of InterSystems IRIS technology. 

InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL is a fully managed cloud service that brings the power of InterSystems IRIS relational database capabilities used by thousands of enterprise customers to a broad audience of application developers and data professionals. InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML is an option

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Announcement Benjamin De Boe · Nov 14, 2023

We recently published a new White Paper on the use of reporting nodes ("asynchronous reporting mirror members" in full) in a mirrored environment. More and more customers are looking into this mechanism as a quick and easy way to set up a copy of their production data that stays current, yet can be used for analytical querying or heavy-duty reporting workloads without impacting the source system. Read the White Paper here.

As always, we're curious to hear your own feedback on how you've used this mirroring option in your organization, and whether you have ideas on how we can make it even more

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Nov 9, 2023 3m read

With the release of InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL, we're getting more frequent questions about how to establish secure connections over JDBC and other driver technologies. While we have nice summary and detailed documentation on the driver technologies themselves, our documentation does not go as far to describe individual client tools, such as our personal favourite DBeaver. In this article, we'll describe the steps to create a secure connection from DBeaver to your Cloud SQL deployment.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Sep 21, 2023

InterSystems has decided to stop further development of the InterSystems IRIS Natural Language Processing, formerly known as iKnow, technology and label it as deprecated as of the 2023.3 release of InterSystems IRIS.InterSystems will continue to support existing customers using the technology, but does not recommend starting new development projects outside of the core text exploration use cases it was originally designed for.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Jun 30, 2023

InterSystems IRIS Cloud SQL is a fully managed cloud service that brings the power of InterSystems IRIS relational database capabilities used by thousands of enterprise customers to a broad audience of application developers and data professionals. InterSystems IRIS Cloud IntegratedML is an option to this database-as-a-service that offers easy access to powerful Automated Machine Learning capabilities in a SQL-native form, through a set of simple SQL commands that can easily be embedded in application code to augment them with ML models that run close to the data.

Today, we announce the Developer Access Program for these two offerings. Application developers can now self-register for the service, create deployments and start building composable applications and smart data services, with all provisioning, configuration and administration taken care of by the service.

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Announcement Benjamin De Boe · Jun 13, 2023

Last week at the InterSystems Global Summit, we announced our new Foreign Tables capability, which was introduced as an experimental feature with the 2023.1 release earlier this year. We're now inviting you to join the Early Access Program for Foreign Tables and kick the tires on this new capability, so you can let us know whether it suits your needs and what capabilities we should prioritize next.

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So what are Foreign Tables, really? -- In case you don't have the time or popcorn to watch this nice overview video, Foreign Tables help you project data to IRIS SQL that is physically stored

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Feb 13, 2023 4m read

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. 

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Jan 10, 2023 4m read

As you may well remember from Global Summit 2022 or the 2022.2 launch webinar, we're releasing an exciting new capability for including in your analytics solutions on InterSystems IRIS. Columnar Storage introduces an alternative way of storing your SQL table data that offers an order-of-magnitude speedup for analytical queries. First released as an experimental feature in 2022.2, the latest 2022.3 Developer Preview includes a bunch of updates we thought were worth a quick post here.

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Sep 13, 2022 8m read

In the vast and varied SQL database market, InterSystems IRIS stands out as a platform that goes way beyond just SQL, offering a seamless multimodel experience and supporting a rich set of development paradigms. Especially the advanced Object-Relational engine has helped organizations use the best-fit development approach for each facet of their data-intensive workloads, for example ingesting data through Objects and simultaneously querying it through SQL. Persistent Classes correspond to SQL tables, their properties to table columns and business logic is easily accessed using User-Defined Functions or Stored Procedures. In this article, we'll zoom in on a little bit of the magic just below the surface, and discuss how it may affect your development and deployment practices. This is an area of the product where we have plans to evolve and improve, so please don't hesitate to share your views and experiences using the comments section below.

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Dec 15, 2021 4m read

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

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Dec 15, 2021 4m read

This is the second piece in our series on 2021.2 SQL enhancements delivering an adaptive, high-performance SQL experience. In this article, we'll zoom in on the innovations in gathering Table Statistics, which are of course the primary input for the Run Time Plan Choice capability we described in the previous article.

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Dec 15, 2021 4m read

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 smiley.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Jun 14, 2021

InterSystems is very pleased to announce the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, InterSystems IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect, which are now Generally Available to our customers and partners.

The enhancements in this release offer developers more freedom to build fast and robust applications in their language of choice, both server-side and client-side. This release also enables users to consume large amounts of information more effectively through new and faster analytics capabilities.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Apr 21, 2021

Preview releases are now available for the 2021.1 version of InterSystems IRIS, IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect.

As this is a preview release, we are eager to learn from your experiences with this new release ahead of its General Availability release next month. Please share your feedback through the Developer Community so we can build a better product together.

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2021.1 is an extended maintenance (EM) release.Many important new capabilities and enhancements have been added in continuous delivery (CD) releases since 2020.1, the previous EM release.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Apr 8, 2021

GA releases are now available for the 2020.4 version of InterSystems IRIS, InterSystems IRIS for Health and InterSystems IRIS Studio.

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform 2020.4 makes it even easier to develop, deploy and manage augmented applications and business processes that bridge data and application silos. It has many new capabilities including:

Enhancements for application and interface developers, including:

  • Support for Java SE 11 LTS, both when using Oracle OpenJDK and AdoptOpenJDK
  • Support for Connection Pooling for JDBC
  • A new "foreach" action in routing rules for segmented virtual
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Article Benjamin De Boe · Feb 23, 2021 1m read

Hi, 

I just published isc-mem-config on OpenExchange and ZPM. It's a prototype to test whether this kind of user experience (UX) is a good fit for novice and / or more seasoned users. The settings it generates are already fairly-good-practice :-), but also being reviewed by experts within InterSystems in parallel.

Happy to hear your feedback on the applicability to your and/or your customers' day-to-day business, where this would fit best in the broad spectrum ranging from documentation, over installation to standalone tools.

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Discussion Benjamin De Boe · Nov 9, 2020

Hi,

InterSystems IRIS has long supported the obvious translation functions required to for converting to upper or lowercase to enforce case-insensitive string comparison (e.g. in ObjectScript with $zconvert) and sorting (e.g. with SQL collation functions, not to be confused with NLS collation). Customers in international contexts have at times used custom workarounds to also treat accent insensitivity or even more advanced normalization duct tape. We’re looking to address such use cases at the system and SQL level to increase convenience for this international audience, which is well represented on the Developer Community.

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Announcement Benjamin De Boe · Oct 26, 2020

The first full release of our iKnow open-source NLP library is now available on GitHub and PyPI

The iKnow engine has been available as an InterSystems embedded technology for almost 10 years and the core engine was published to open source earlier this year. Now, in the slipstream of Virtual Summit 2020, we're glad to announce the availability of v1.0, which adds all-Python access to the core engine, documentation and samples on the language model contents and a Jupyter demo notebook to get you started. The technology continues to be available as part of IRIS for embedded use under the name I

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Announcement Benjamin De Boe · Aug 20, 2020

Hi,

As part of our continuous efforts to expand and improve the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, we’ve set up a brief survey around SQL monitoring. Your feedback will help us in designing and developing the right tools for the job and improve the platform’s overall ease-of-use. Please use the link below to access the survey, which should only take around 5 minutes to complete.

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Article Benjamin De Boe · Mar 25, 2020 5m read

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.

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InterSystems Official Benjamin De Boe · Feb 18, 2020

Last week at the InterSystems BeNeLux Symposium, we announced the publication of the InterSystems iKnow Natural Language Processing technology to Open Source. This enables developers and researchers to take advantage of this unique technology at any level of their application stack, workflow or experiment.

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