Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.
Today, we continue talking about Interoperability, specifically monitoring your Interoperability deployments. If you haven't yet, set up Alerting for all your Interoperability productions to get alerts about errors and production state in general.

Inactivity Timeout is a setting common to all Interoperability Business Hosts. A business host has an Inactive status after it has not received any messages within the number of seconds specified by the Inactivity Timeout field. The production Monitor Service periodically reviews the status of business services and business operations within the production and marks the item as Inactive if it has not done anything within the Inactivity Timeout period.
The default value is 0 (zero). If this setting is 0, the business host will never be marked Inactive, no matter how long it stands idle.

This is an extremely useful setting since it generates alerts, which, together with configured alerting, allows for real-time notifications about production issues. Business Host being idle means there might be some issues with production, integrations, or network connectivity worth looking into.
However, Business Host can have only one constant Inactivity Timeout setting, which might generate unnecessary alerts during known periods of low traffic: nights, weekends, holidays, etc.
In this article, I will outline several approaches towards dynamic Inactivity Timeout implementation. While I do provide a working example (currently running in production for one of our customers), this article is more of a guideline for building your own dynamic Inactivity Timeout implementation, so don't consider the proposed solution as the only alternative.

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· Dec 19, 2023 8m read
VIP in Azure

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in Azure, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to Azure, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in Azure as subnets can span several zones). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without the using Load Balancers suggested in most other Azure reference architectures.

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If you work with Productions, highlighting connections between Business Hosts is a very convenient feature, allowing developers to get a visual representation of a data flow.

This feature works by default with all system Business Hosts. If a user writes their own Business Services, Processes, or Operations, they must implement the OnGetConnections method for this functionality to work with their custom Business Hosts (or use Ens.DataType.ConfigName properties for connections).
That said, the SMP shows only the first layer of connections of the selected Business Host. Sometimes, we need to get connections of connections recursively to build a complete data flow graph. Or we might need this connection information to check which downstream systems might be affected by a change upstream.

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Recently I needed to restore a version of a production class, which was overwritten by compilation and running UpdateProduction. As the correct version was unavailable in the source control, I used journals to restore the data. Journals store a plethora of information about what's happening in the system and are quite a powerful tool. This article explains how to work with journals to extract the data you require.

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· May 23, 2023 1m read
Production settings

When developing interoperability productions, it might be useful to have settings outside of a Business Host. The primary reason is when you need a setting to affect several different Business Hosts and want to guarantee that the value is the same. While System Default Settings can be used to propagate settings for Business Hosts, they can be changed by overriding the value on a BH level (although the advantage of Business Host settings set via SDS is that they don't need custom code which our current approach requires).
Another reason is when you need to affect non-setting parts of the Business Host configuration (PoolSize, Enabled, etc.)

We will be adding an env setting to a production.

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Article
· May 18, 2023 2m read
Code Golf: String Rotations

Let's have a round of Code Golf!

String rotation is when you take a word and move some of its letters to the end of the word, so the first letter becomes the second letter, the second letter becomes the third, and so on. Last letter becomes first. Rotation can happen only in one direction →.
Your task is to write a method that will receive two strings. It then must return an integer value of how many times needed to rotate the strings to be equal.
As usual shortest solution wins.

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Git stores complete history - meaning you would never lose your files, even if they are deleted, they are still available. That, however, presents an issue if large or sensitive files have been committed. Deleting them DOES NOT remove them from history. Recently one of the repos I work on became unexpectedly large, so here's how you can resolve that:

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In this article, we will establish an encrypted JDBC connection between Tableau Desktop and InterSystems IRIS database using a JDBC driver.
While documentation on configuring TLS with Java clients covers all possible topics on establishing an encrypted JDBC connection, configuring it with Tableau might be a little bit tricky, so I decided to write it down.

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Article
· Nov 4, 2022 9m read
VIP in AWS

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in AWS, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

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Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.

Today, let's talk about interoperability.

Issue

When you have an active interoperability production, you have two separate process flows: a working production that processes messages and a CI/CD process flow that updates code, production configuration and system default settings.

Clearly, CI/CD process affects interoperability. But questions are:

  • What exactly happens during an update?
  • What do we need to do to minimize or eliminate production downtime during an update?
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InterSystems Native SDK for Python is a lightweight interface to InterSystems IRIS APIs that were once available only through ObjectScript.

I'm especially interested in the ability to call ObjectScript methods, class methods, to be precise. It works, and it works great, but by default, calls only support scalar arguments: strings, booleans, integers, and floats.

But if you want to:
- Pass or return structures, such as dicts or lists
- Pass or return streams

You'll need to write some glue code or take this project (installs with pip install edpy). edpy package gives you one simple signature:

call(iris, class_name, method_name, args)

which allows you to call any ObjectScript method and get results back.

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Function as a service (FaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. Building an application following this model is one way of achieving a "serverless" architecture, and is typically used when building microservices applications.

Wikipedia

FaaS is an extremely popular approach to running workloads in the cloud, allowing developers to focus on writing code.

This article will show you how to deploy InterSystems IRIS methods in a FaaS way.

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Article
· Jan 26, 2022 4m read
Container configuration management

If you're deploying to more than one environment/region/cloud/customer, you will inevitably encounter the issue of configuration management.

While all (or just several) of your deployments can share the same source code, some parts, such as configuration (settings, passwords) differ from deployment to deployment and must be managed somehow.

In this article, I will try to offer several tips on that topic. This article talks mainly about container deployments.

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InterSystems Reports is powered by Logi Report (formerly named JReport), a product of Logi Analytics. InterSystems Reports is supported by InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health. It provides a robust modern reporting solution that includes:

  • Embedded operational reporting which can be customized by both report developers and end users.
  • Pixel-perfect formatting that lets you develop highly specific form grids or other special layout elements for invoices, documents, and forms.
  • Banded layouts that provide structure for aggregated and detailed data.
  • Exact positioning of headers, footers, aggregations, detailed data, images, and sub-reports.
  • A variety of page report types.
  • Large-scale dynamic report scheduling and distribution including export to PDF, XLS, HTML, XML, and other file formats, printing, and archiving for regulatory compliance.

InterSystems Reports consists of:

  • A report designer, which provides Design and Preview Tabs that enable report developers to create and preview reports with live data.
  • A report server which provides end users browser-based access to run, schedule, filter, and modify reports.

From InterSystems documentation.

This article focuses on the Server part of InterSystems Reports and provides a guide on running Report Server in containers while persisting all the data.

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Article
· Apr 21, 2021 1m read
Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V in IRIS Terminal

It's possible to enable Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V in IRIS Terminal for Windows.

To do that, open Terminal and select Edit > User Settings and enable Windows edit accelerators. This setting specifies whether the Terminal enables the common Windows edit shortcuts (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Shift+V), in addition to the basic Terminal edit shortcuts (Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert).

After that Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V would work.

Also <SYNTAX> errors after incorrect copy/paste go away.

Docs.

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Recently I wanted to get a list of all cached queries and their texts. Here's how to do that.

First create an SQL Procedure returning Cache Query text from a Cached Query routine name:

Class test.CQ
{

/// SELECT test.CQ_GetText()
ClassMethod GetText(routine As %String) As %String [ CodeMode = expression, SqlProc ]
{
##class(%SQLCatalog).GetCachedQueryInfo(routine)
}

}

And after that you can execute this query:

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