Article
· Sep 18, 2023 7m read
Vectors support, well almost

Nowadays so much noise around LLM, AI, and so on. Vector databases are kind of a part of it, and already many different realizations for the support in the world outside of IRIS.

Why Vector?

  • Similarity Search: Vectors allow for efficient similarity search, such as finding the most similar items or documents in a dataset. Traditional relational databases are designed for exact match searches, which are not suitable for tasks like image or text similarity search.
  • Flexibility: Vector representations are versatile and can be derived from various data types, such as text (via embeddings like Word2Vec, BERT), images (via deep learning models), and more.
  • Cross-Modal Searches: Vectors enable searching across different data modalities. For instance, given a vector representation of an image, one can search for similar images or related texts in a multimodal database.

And many other reasons.

So, for this pyhon contest, I decided to try to implement this support. And unfortunately I did not manage to finish it in time, below I'll explain why.

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For the upcoming Python contest, I would like to make a small demo, on how to create a simple REST application using Python, which will use IRIS as a database. Using this tools

  • FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production
  • SQLAlchemy is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper that gives application developers the full power and flexibility of SQL
  • Alembic is a lightweight database migration tool for usage with the SQLAlchemy Database Toolkit for Python.
  • Uvicorn is an ASGI web server implementation for Python.

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As an example of an application on Java working with Hibernate dialect for IRIS, wanted to use RealWorld application, and found realization for Quarkus. RealWorld application is an example of an application close to some real one, with already prepared tests for the backend. Most of the examples of realizations can be found here

RealWorld Example App

The RealWorld example application is often referred to as the "Wikipedia for building full-stack applications." It serves as a standardized prototype that developers can use to create applications using various programming languages and frameworks. The application provides a real-world use case by mimicking a blogging platform, complete with features like user authentication, profile management, article posting, and comments. With a comprehensive set of specifications, including ready-made backend API documentation and frontend designs, it allows developers to see how the same functional requirements are implemented across different technology stacks. The RealWorld example is widely used as a learning tool and a benchmark for comparing various technologies.

Quarkus

Quarkus is an open-source, Kubernetes-native Java framework tailored for the GraalVM and HotSpot. Created with the aim to enhance the modern cloud-native environment, it significantly reduces the footprint and startup time of Java applications. Quarkus is known for its "container-first" philosophy, allowing developers to build lightweight, high-performing applications with a focus on microservices architecture. This flexibility has made it a popular choice for organizations looking to transition into serverless or cloud-based platforms, combining both imperative and reactive programming models. Whether it's a traditional web application or a complex system of microservices, Quarkus provides a robust platform for building scalable and maintainable software.

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InterSystems IRIS offers various ways how to profile your code, in most cases it produces enough information to find the places where the most time is spent or where the most global sets. But sometimes it's difficult to understand the execution flow and how it ended at that point.

To solve this, I've decided to implement a way to build a report in a way, so, it's possible to dive by stack down

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Article
· Apr 19, 2023 2m read
Apache Superset now with IRIS

Apache Superset is a modern data exploration and data visualization platform. Superset can replace or augment proprietary business intelligence tools for many teams. Superset integrates well with a variety of data sources.

And now it is possible to use with InterSystems IRIS as well.

An online demo is available and it uses IRIS Cloud SQL as a data source.

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Let me introduce my new project, which is irissqlcli, REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) for InterSystems IRIS SQL

  • Syntax Highlighting
  • Suggestions (tables, functions)
  • 20+ output formats
  • stdin support
  • Output to files

Install it with pip

pip install irissqlcli

Or run with docker

docker run -it caretdev/irissqlcli irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM:SYS@host.docker.internal:1972/USER

Connect to IRIS

$ irissqlcli iris://_SYSTEM@localhost:1972/USER -W
Password for _SYSTEM:
Server:  InterSystems IRIS Version 2022.3.0.606 xDBC Protocol Version 65
Version: 0.1.0
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> select $ZVERSION
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Expression_1                                                                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IRIS for UNIX (Ubuntu Server LTS for ARM64 Containers) 2022.3 (Build 606U) Mon Jan 30 2023 09:05:12 EST |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set
Time: 0.063s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER> help
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Command  | Shortcut          | Description                                                |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| .exit    | \q                | Exit.                                                      |
| .mode    | \T                | Change the table format used to output results.            |
| .once    | \o [-o] filename  | Append next result to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
| .schemas | \ds               | List schemas.                                              |
| .tables  | \dt [schema]      | List tables.                                               |
| \e       | \e                | Edit command with editor (uses $EDITOR).                   |
| help     | \?                | Show this help.                                            |
| nopager  | \n                | Disable pager, print to stdout.                            |
| notee    | notee             | Stop writing results to an output file.                    |
| pager    | \P [command]      | Set PAGER. Print the query results via PAGER.              |
| prompt   | \R                | Change prompt format.                                      |
| quit     | \q                | Quit.                                                      |
| tee      | tee [-o] filename | Append all results to an output file (overwrite using -o). |
+----------+-------------------+------------------------------------------------------------+
Time: 0.012s
[SQL]_SYSTEM@localhost:USER>

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On the Latest GlobalSummit 2022, InterSystems Introduced Cloud SQL. So, you may have lightweight InterSystems IRIS with access to SQL only. Well, what if you would still need some Interoperability features in the cloud as well? There are various solutions on the market nowadays, which offer a bunch of integration adapters out of the box and can be extended with support from the community. Some time ago, I've implemented an adapter for the Node-RED project, which can be deployed manually everywhere you want. Now I would like to introduce a new integration with my recent discovery, n8n.io

Banner image

n8n.io is a workflow automation platform, that supports over 200 different integrations out of the box and from a community, and now including InterSystems IRIS.

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Article
· Jul 30, 2022 5m read
Introduction to Django part 3

Continuing to observe the possibilities of Django, and usage with IRIS. The first we have looked how to define models and connect to tables already existing in IRIS, than we extended embedded Django Administration portal, with an ability to see what data we have in that models, with filters, editing and even pagination.

Time to go to real action, now we a going to create some REST API, on Django, based on the same data, we used before from the package posts-and-tags.

To do so, we will use Django REST Framework

Django REST Framework

Django REST framework is a powerful and flexible toolkit for building Web APIs.

Some reasons you might want to use REST framework:

  • The Web browsable API is a huge usability win for your developers.
  • Authentication policies including packages for OAuth1a and OAuth2.
  • Serialization that supports both ORM and non-ORM data sources.
  • Customizable all the way down - just use regular function-based views if you don't need the more powerful features.
  • Extensive documentation, and great community support.
  • Used and trusted by internationally recognised companies including Mozilla, Red Hat, Heroku, and Eventbrite.

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Article
· Jul 25, 2022 8m read
Introduction to Django part 2

In the first part, I've shown how to start a new project on Django, as well as define new models and add already existing models.

This time, I'll introduce an admin panel, available out of the box and how it can be useful.

Important note: do not expect that if you try to repeat actions from this post it will work for you, it does not. During the article, I had to do some fixes in the django-iris project, and even in DB-API driver made by InterSystems to fix some issues there as well, and I think this driver is still in development, and we will get more stable driver in future. Let's decide that this article only explains how it could be if we would have all done.

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Article
· Dec 3, 2021 1m read
VSCode-ObjectScript on GitHub

Not so while ago GitHub introduced, ability to very quickly run VSCode in the browser for any repository hosted there. Press the . key on any repository or pull request, or swap .com with .dev in the URL, to go directly to a VS Code environment in your browser.

github dev

This VSCode is a light version of the Desktop version but works entirely in Browser. And due to this, it has a limitation for extensions which was allowed to work this way. And let me introduce the new version 1.2.1 of VSCode-ObjectScript extension which now supports running in Browser mode.

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Previously I have already tried to play with Google Data Studio when I connected it to InterSystems FHIRaaS. It has quite a nice UI, with a few chart types available out of the box, it can be quite easily connected to some plain tables (stored as CSV or JSON, for instance), and gives the ability to build quite flexible analytics over it. So, I have decided to implement a new connector to InterSystems Analytics (DeepSee), with the ability to select a cube and do some queries on it.

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Article
· Aug 20, 2021 6m read
GitHub Codespaces with IRIS

Some time ago GitHub, has announced the new feature, GitHub Codespaces. It gives an ability to run VSCode in the browser, with almost the same power as it would run locally on your machine, but also with a power of clouds, so, you are able to choose the machine type with up to 32 CPU cores and 64 GB of RAM.

Looks impressive, is not it? But how it could help us, to work with projects driven by InterSystems IRIS? Let's have a look, how to configure it for us.

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Google has one intersting tool named Data Studio. This tool allows creating some interactive dashboards, based on your data, available from the internet. It already offers hundreds of connectors to any sort of data developed by the community. As well as some amount of community developed visualizing. And most importantly, Google offers a way to develop your own connector to your data.

FHIRaaS provides a REST API, and it's available from the internet. So I've decided to try to create some basic report on data stored there. And in the end, I got this.

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