I have not been worked with Visual Studio, so, have no idea how it works there. But Instead of Studio, I would recommend using VSCode, of course, it already supports debugging, for sure you can watch variables (and expressions) as well as hovering variables. It does not support objects in a some readable way but supports it as an expression, so obj.property will work.

Unfortunately, for some reasons some systems may not use the latest versions of InterSystems products. While Integrity checks in some cases can be used on lower versions. And from the other side, for some systems reversing the system to some backup can be used as only last chance to restore the data, due to the sensitivity of stored data and the impossibility to restore data since the latest backup. So, If I would find database degradation I would better attempt to recover it, fortunately, I have an experience, and possibly lose some data, but the amount of lost data will be significantly less then when I would use a backup. Around 100 hundred GB journals per day, with tens of terabytes of data supposed for backup, make the task to restore system quickly as impossible for a system that has to be available with no downtime.

This feature, just implemented, so, you can't see it in a public stable release. But, you can install manually the latest beta release, where it should be already available. Download vsix file, and install it in VSCode with command Install from VSIX...

So, it means, that now you have no way how to use this data anymore. Printing ability provided by browser with no option to change printer. And no way to access disk drive directly.

I would offer you to change %Stream.FileCharacter with %Stream.BinaryCharacter. While for Base64 is Character is ok, pdf is a binary format and %Stream.FileCharacter can break it.

In that particular case, we have 16k blocks, due to the past issues with caching big string blocks over the ECP. 

But I think, there are a few ways how integrity can be improved, for such cases. I see at least two reasons why we should check integrity periodically.

•  We don't have any errors in the database, which may cause to a system failure.
• We don't have any issues in the database, and we ensure that our data is completely available.

I'm faced with an issue when error on a pointer level causes issues with WriteDaemon, and our system just died, when the application tried to get access to the data. And it took some time to figure out why it has happened, even when we did not have any issues with database at all, just only with ECP. That happened in the version 2012.2. And I'm thinking I would be able to set how deeply I could scan blocks, let's say, don't care about data blocks, just scan only pointers blocks. I don't have proportions, but I'm sure that in most cases we would have much more data blocks than pointers blocks. So, it would make integrity check give some results faster.

I know quite well how the database looks inside. But I did not manage, yet to look at how database backups work, and mostly interesting incremental backups. As I know backup works with blocks, so, maybe there is a way to make incremental integrity checks as well. It will not help to find the issues that happened in unchangeable blocks due to hardware issues but could say, that lately changed data is Ok.

Not exactly correct, Linux allows it, but not sure if Caché/IRIS can use this way.

What would you recommend, if the amount of data which have to be checked is quite large, let's say 100TB? For sure, it's not one solid database file, split by many files with sizes up to about 6TB. But most of the data is alive.

You have to open any folder, and it appears 

As I don't know your version of Caché, I'll suggest that it's quite new. So, I got this code working for IRIS in docker(Ubuntu). Did not check Windows.

auto
  Set fs = ##class(%Stream.FileCharacter).%New()
  Set a = $Random(100)
  Set b = $Random(100)
  Do fs.WriteLine(a)
  Do fs.WriteLine(b)

  Set ccontrol = $Select($ZVersion["IRIS": "iris", 1: "ccontrol")
  Set ccontrol = ccontrol _ $Select($$$isWINDOWS: ".exe", 1: "")
  Set ccontrol = ##class(%File).NormalizeFilename(ccontrol, $System.Util.BinaryDirectory())
  Set instance = ##class(%SYS.System).GetInstanceName()
  ZWrite a,b

  Set stdin = fs.Filename
  Set stdout = ##class(%File).TempFilename()
  Set sc = $zf(-100, "/STDIN="""_stdin_"""/STDOUT="""_stdout_"""", ccontrol, "session", instance, "-U", $Namespace, "TestRun^test")
  ZWrite ^zparas
  Quit 
TestRun
  Write !,"Enter First Variable Name: " R a
  Write !,"Enter Second Variable Name: " R b
  Set ^zparas=a_" "_b
  Quit 

And The output like this

a=17
b=62
^zparas="17 62"

The Job way also possible just a bit more complex.

First of all, classes code stored completely differently with plain routines. So, the best way to compare two namespaces is to export all the code in UDL format, which in fact the same as in Studio, usually it was just XML.

From my side I would recommend using VSCode for this task, there you can export any kind of source from InterSystems products with any version since 2016.2. How this process would look there. 

• open any empty folder in VSCode
• Configure it to desired server and namespace
• export source code from InterSystems Explorer view
• do, git init, and commit all exported files
• delete all sources
• switch to another namespace, in the same explorer view, by just opening another namespace.
• export all sources again.

git will show the differences.

As I'm a developer of VSCode extension for InterSystems, you can contact me directly, or through public issues

On Windows with cterm.exe you can write special terminal scripts.

on Linux, as I know terminal scripts not available, so, you just prepare the list of answers, if it's fixed. and just send it to stdin.

csession -U MYNAMESPACE ^MyRoutine < myanswers.txt

or

cat myanswers.txt | csession -U MYNAMESPACE ^MyRoutine