New post

Work Queue Manager (WQM) is a feature of InterSystems IRIS that enables you to improve performance by distributing work to multiple concurrent processes programmatically. The idea is that you split the work into chunks, and WQM distributes the chunks across worker processes and can provide the info that the work is done.

However, recently, I got an interesting question: there's a large logical transaction composed of ~1,000,000 individual objects and SQL inserts and updates. Some updates are CPU-intensive, so the original idea was to use WQM to split an update into chunks to speed things up.

But, here's a catch: if one of the individual 1,000,000 changes fails (there's a variety of application-level checks so that it can fail, and that's not even that abnormal a behavior), the entire transaction must be rolled back. That creates a problem: each chunk must report success before committing their individual transactions, and someone must get all these reports and decide if we are committing or not.

Unfortunately, it looks like WQM does not have a bidirectional communication between workers and manager, so I suggested an approach using events:

  1. Start jobs.
  2. Wait for all jobs to report success using $System.Event.WaitMsg().
  3. Send Commit or Rollback using the $System.Event.Signal().
2 9
1 173

Multi-tap or multi-press is the name given to the historic technique of writing SMS on the first mobile phones with a keyboard of 10-12 numeric keys.
For example, to type LOL you need to press 5 three times, 6 three times and 5 three times again.
Your task is to write a function that takes a string as input and returns the repeated digits associated with each character according to the multi-tap system.

5 18
1 329
Discussion
· Aug 21, 2023
AWS Batch

Has anyone tried AWS Batch with InterSystems IRIS docker images?

I have a noninteractive workload (but it requires internet access from the job to deliver results), so I'm considering using it as a simpler alternative to ECS since Fargate backs both, and that's enough for my use case.

I wonder if anyone tried and cares to share the results, issues, cfn templates.

0 1
0 136
Discussion
· Jul 28, 2023
Code Golf: Parenthesis

Our previous code golf ended with an overwhelming win, so now it's time for another one.
Parenthesis Hell is a Lisp-like esoteric programming language(esolang).
As a Lisp-like language, the code consists only of nested matched pairs of opened and closed parenthesis.
Your task is to write a method that receives a string of parenthesis and returns 1 if the order of the parenthesis is valid. For example, the string of parenthesis (())() is valid because it contains a matched pair of opened and closed parenthesis at each position. The string ()((()))) is not valid because it contains one unmatched parenthesis.

5 37
0 613
Discussion
· Mar 2, 2023
Code Golf: Isogram

It's time for a Code Golf round!

Isogram

A word or phrase that has no repeating letters, consecutive or non-consecutive.


Implement a method that checks if the received string is an isogram or not.
Assume the empty string is an isogram.
Ignore the letter case.

Allowed inputs: A-Z, a-z.

As usual, the shortest solution wins!

4 11
0 303
Discussion
· Nov 9, 2022
Code Golf: Word Order

We're back with a code golf!

You will receive a string. Each word in the string will contain a number.
This number is the position that word should have in the sentence.
If the input string is empty, return an empty string.
The output can only be in words, without the given numbers.

Input

"i2s T1his Te4st a3"

Output

This is a Test

2 13
0 565
Discussion
· Sep 16, 2022
txt2img
Several models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and StableDiffusion, became available recently. All these models generate digital images from natural language descriptions. The most interesting one, in my opinion, is StableDiffusion which is open source - released barely a few weeks ago. There's now an entire community trying to leverage it for various use cases.
2 0
0 812

Leet (or "1337"), also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Additionally, it modifies certain words based on a system of suffixes and alternate meanings. There are many dialects or linguistic varieties in different online communities. Wikipedia

3 8
0 503
Discussion
· Mar 4, 2022
Code Golf: Label Validation

New month, new code golf!

You will receive a string with a label code with numbers and letters.
Our challenge is to check if this code begins with 1, 2, or 3 and ends with A, B, C, S, or R.
It should return true(1) if so or return false(0) otherwise.
As usual shortest solution wins.

Input

"198739A79D9R"

Output

1

6 4
1 304
Discussion
· Feb 2, 2022
Code Golf: Paired Opposites

You will receive a string of comma-separated integers whose elements have both a negative and a positive value, except for one integer that is either only negative or only positive, our challenge will be to find that integer.
As usual shortest solution wins.

Input

"1,-1,2,-2,3"

Output

3

3 has no matching negative appearance

4 34
0 682
Discussion
· Nov 17, 2021
Code Golf - Encoder

We need to send some coordinates to a spaceship through a laser beam.
To do that we have to encode it, and beam it out into space.
Your mission is to implement the encoder with a compression standard.
As usual shortest solution wins.

Task

You will receive a string of comma-separated integers and you will return a new string of comma-separated integers and sequence descriptors.

Input

"0,2,4,5,5,5,5,5,3,4,5"

Output

"0-4/2,5*5,3-5"

4 8
2 563
Discussion
· Oct 8, 2021
Code Golf: Just add water...

Have you ever seen those vaccum compressed towels, that look like a pill and after you add water became a towel?

That's our challenge for today. As usual shortest solution wins.

Task

You will receive an integer number and you will return a new number where each digit is repeated a number of times equals to its value.

Input:

42

Output:

444422

Note:

3 11
0 425

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output.

Wikipedia.

How about a fun challenge?

The task is to write a quine in InterSystems ObjectScript. It can be a class, or a method, or a routine, or just a line to be executed in a terminal. You decide!

Here's some resources you might consider useful:

Hard mode: do not use source code access functions.

Here's my (extremely uninspired, I know) attempt:

Class User.Quine
{

/// do ##class(User.Quine).Test()
ClassMethod Test()
{
    set sc = ##class(%Compiler.UDL.TextServices).GetTextAsString($namespace, $classname(), .str)
    write str
}

}

It produces this output:

How many different ways of producing a quine are there in ObjectScript?

9 15
0 491

Images for other languages are often build using multistage build process.

What about InterSystems IRIS?

Consider this Dockerfile:

FROM irishealth-community:2020.4.0.524.0 AS builder

# Load code into USER and compile
# Adjust settings, etc.

FROM irishealth-community:2020.4.0.524.0

# replace in standard kit with what we modified in first stage

COPY --from=builder /usr/irissys/iris.cpf /usr/irissys/.
COPY --from=builder /usr/irissys/mgr/IRIS.DAT /usr/irissys/mgr/.
COPY --from=builder /usr/irissys/mgr/user/IRIS.DAT /usr/irissys/mgr/user/.

The advantage of this approach is the image size.
The disadvantage is that on a final stage developer must know/remember all the modified places in the builder image.

But otherwise is this approach OK for InterSystems IRIS?
Have anyone tried to build IRIS images this way?

2 9
0 250
Discussion
· Jan 10, 2021
Code Golf: Diamonds
To start the year let's have a round of CodeGolf!

You know the drill. Shortest solution wins.

Print a size ascending range of Diamonds using the numbers 1 to 9, ranging from size 1 to size N, each diamond separated by a blank line.

A size 1 diamond should look like this, a single centered 1:

         1

With the size N=9 diamond looking like this:

2 19
0 457