Recently I was conducting a remote support session with a site. The desktop they were sharing with me was on a PC configured with German as the native language. Since my German is rather rusty, and virtually non-existent when it comes to computing terms, I was glad to be able to switch the Portal session into English.

This is done from the page that appears when you use the About link:

I recently helped a site investigate a problem that appeared after they upgraded their Windows instance of Caché from 2015.1 to 2017.1. A terminal session launched from the server's desktop cube was unable to run OS-level commands using the $ZF(-1) function. For instance, using the no-op command "REM" as follows:

write $zf(-1,"rem")

was returning -1, indicating that the Windows command could not be issued.

During a Caché system management training course today we discussed structural database integrity (a.k.a. physical integrity) and the tools InterSystems provides for checking integrity and fixing problems.

It's good to see growing participation in DC. However, sometimes I think that responses posted as Answers to Questions would be better classified as Comments. For example, the respondent could be seeking clarification about the original question (e.g. "What Caché version are you using?"), or perhaps following up someone else's answer or comment.

Prompted by this post about accessing a global at its original location after you have changed a mapping, here's a tip about one specific dropdown in Portal that's sometimes useful.

How about displaying a different icon alongside a question for which there is an accepted answer? Perhaps add a green checkmark adornment to the existing icon?

I only recently noticed the presence of a local database named CACHE alongside the more familiar CACHESYS, CACHELIB, CACHETEMP and CACHEAUDIT.

A bit of digging through the documentation archive led me to conclude that the CACHE database arrived in 2010.2, where the release notes say:

Sometimes I observe people scrolling manually down to the bottom of the Console Log document when they want to see the most recent messages. So I want to draw attention to the handy link that does the job for you in a single click:

During startup a Caché/Ensemble/HealthShare instance must consult a parameter file to get some information it needs at the early stages of startup. By default it uses the file called cache.cpf, but by adding an extra argument to the ccontrol start command you can make it use an alternative file.