Question Robert Cemper · Feb 3, 2025
USER>do $System.Python.Shell()
 
ERROR #5002: ObjectScript-Error: <OBJECT DISPATCH>Shell+16^%SYS.Python.1 
*Failed to Load Python: Check documentation and messages.log, 
Check CPF parameters:[PythonRuntimeLibrary,PythonRuntimeLibraryVersion], 
Check sys.path setup in: $INSTANCE/lib/python/iris_site.py
02/03/25-18:27:39:497 (13156) 1 [Generic.Event] CPF settings (PythonRuntimeLibraryVersion) do not specify python correctly - Python can not be loaded
02/03/25-18:27:39:498 (13156) 1 [Generic.
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Article Robert Cemper · Feb 3, 2025 3m read

Host Variables are a rather common programming feature in many implementations of SQL. 
A recent question in DC made me aware that in IRIS, Caché, Ensemble, ... 
host variables just exist within embedded SQL

>  You can supply host variables for Embedded SQL queries only. <

Related examples are included in the available Documentation

This is a description  for a workaround if you don't / can't use embedded SQL.

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Question Robert Cemper · Feb 1, 2025

Import from DC-PT, @Edilson Eberle Carvalho

We have some *.mac routines and we need to preserve their source,
as these routines have intellectual authorship and can only be used per session
with the right to use (they cannot be viewed or edited).
The question: how to keep only the routine object in the IRIS namespace,
without interfering with its execution?

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Article Robert Cemper · Dec 22, 2024 3m read

I recently met an ages old issue related to code maintenance:

  • You have access to your IRIS server just over ODBC/JDBC
  • no VSCode access, no Studio access
  • no (Web-)Terminal access

But you need to take a look on Classes or Routines or Globals !!
Anyhow SQL is your friend.

  • First you need a simple table as temporary text store.
CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY TABLE  arcc.txt (line VARCHAR(32000))

Not a thrilling action.

  • Next you export your code to local file and import it to your table
CREATE PROCEDURE arcc.show (IN code VARCHAR()) 
  RETURNS INTEGER
  LANGUAGE OBJECTSCRIPT 
 {
	set file=
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Article Robert Cemper · Dec 20, 2024 1m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Dec 9, 2024 40m read

In principle I'm looking in forward direction.
Though from time to time it makes sense to turn back and see the full path taken.

  • I started reporting my reviews almost 4 years ago. 
  • I just reviewed packages that I could reproduce in my environment.
  • Skipping items beyond my physical or mental capacities.
  • So some great packages might not be present here
  • But I added also 139 contributions of other reviewers
  • It was anyhow a total of  769 reviews published
  • Meeting over this time 191 different authors
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Announcement Robert Cemper · Dec 7, 2024

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Oct 9, 2024 3m read

Motivated by personal feedback by @Edilson Eberle Carvalho  and 
an excellent presentation of @Michael Braam  related to Vector Search I'd like to share
my personal approach to Vectors.
When I started and met vectors with 256, 384, and over 1200 dimensions - I felt lost.
However my example
Vector-inside-IRIS - a simplification of iris-vector-search - worked fine.
 
In order to understand the mechanics behind it, I decided to start in small steps.
Our common 3 dimensions describe our physical world quite fine.
Even the half 4th dimension (no negatives) added by Einstein is not to hard to follow.

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Article Robert Cemper · Oct 4, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Sep 12, 2024 2m read

During testing the added Multi-Namespace feature I met a challenge
that required intervention. This simple request created 1000 lines of output.

USER>do ^rcc.find
----------------
 
enter search string [$ZU] <blank> to exit:
          Verbose? (0,1) [0]:
          Force UpperCase? (1,0) [1]:
 
enter code type (CLS,MAC,INT,INC,ALL) [ALL]:
 
select namespace (ALL,%SYS,DOCBOOK,ENSDEMO,ENSEMBLE,SAMPLES,USER) [USER]: all
  • As for the verbose variant you my run a log on your terminal to keep the result in details
  • though a real summary was still missing.
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Article Robert Cemper · Sep 11, 2024 3m read

This story has followed me for more than 20 years.

In the early days of ObjectScript, the volume of $Functions was limited.
You had to write it as part of your program.
But the functionality was often implemented. It just had no name.
To use it, you had "system" calls using $ZU() functions. See Reference

Over time most $ZU() became deprecated and replaced by "official" $Functions.
But how to find then over a thousand lines of code written over decades
by an uncounted number of programmers that were gone with the wind.
Studio was something fresh and not so performant.

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Article Robert Cemper · Sep 7, 2024 1m read

You might know that you can search posts in DC by Tags
starting in left upper  corner   and  

that's fine to start. But - based on some local feedback - some improvements
might make is more useful. actual the SELECT works .. IF TAGS CONTAIN %tag 
This spams you with a lot of results but often much more than useful
so the suggestions for extensions:

  • ... IF TAGS CONTAINS ONLY %tag   // for 1 specific Tag
  • ... IF TAGS CONTAIN  (%tag1,%tag2,%tag3,...)    // several specific tags
  • ... IF TAGS NOT CONTAIN   (%tag4,%tag5)         // exclude unwanted content  
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Article Robert Cemper · Jul 30, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Jun 1, 2024 2m read

Translated from the Spanish Community Article Contest.

Following the latest programming contest on OEX I had some surprising observation.
There were almost exclusive applications based on AI in combination with pre-cooked Py modules.
But digging deeper, all examples used the same technical pieces of IRIS.

Seen from point of view of IRIS it was pretty much the same whether searching for text
or searching for images or other pattern.  It ended in almost exchangeable methods.

This reminds me my private situation at home.

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Article Robert Cemper · May 24, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · May 19, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · May 13, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · May 4, 2024 3m read

Most examples I've seen so far in OEX or DC left the impression that VECTORs
are just something available with SQL with the 3 Functions especially around VECTOR_Search.
* TO_VECTOR()
* VECTOR_DOT_PRODUCT ()
* VECTOR_COSINE ()
There is a very useful summary hidden in iris-vector-search demo package.
From there you find everything you need over several links and corners.

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Article Robert Cemper · May 3, 2024 1m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Apr 26, 2024 3m read

Technical surprises using VECTORs
>>> UPDATED

Building my tech. example provided me with a bunch of findings htt I want to share.
The first vectors I touched appeared with text analysis and more than 200  dimensions.
I have to confess that I feel well with Einstein's 4 dimensional world.
7 to 15 dimensions populating the String Theory are somewhat across the border.
But 200 and more is definitely far beyond my mathematical horizon.

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Article Robert Cemper · Apr 26, 2024 2m read

Geographic use of vector search

The basic idea is to use Vectors in the mathematical sense.
I used geographic coordinates. These are of course only 2-dimensional
but much easier to follow as vectors in text analysis with >200 dimensions.

The example loads a list of worldwide capitals with their coordinates
The coordinates are interpreted as vectors from geographic point 0°N/0 W
(some very wet spot in the Gulf of Guinea, >400 km from the African Coast)
Finding common directions from that spot is a quite theoretical case.
So adjustment to your preferred starting point is implemented.

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Article Robert Cemper · Apr 3, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Mar 21, 2024 2m read

In ObjectScript you have a wide collection of functions that return some value
typically:

set variable = $somefunction(param1,param2, ...)

There is nothing special about that.
But there is a set of functions that I classify as LEFT SIDED 
The specialty of them is that you can use them also on the left of the equal operator 
as a target in the SET command:

set $somefunction(param1,param2, ...) = value

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Article Robert Cemper · Mar 21, 2024 2m read

This is an attempt to run a vector search demo completely in IRIS
There are no external tools and all you need is a Terminal / Console and the management portal.
Special thanks to Alvin Ryanputra as his package iris-vector-search that was the base
of inspiration and the source for test data.
My package is based on IRIS 2024.1 release and requires attention to your processor capabilities.

I attempted to write the demo in pure ObjectScript.
Only the calculation of the description_vectoris done in embedded Python
Calculation of a vector with 384 dimensions over 2247 records takes time.

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Article Robert Cemper · Mar 12, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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Article Robert Cemper · Mar 5, 2024 2m read
  • The idea of this package is to compare the performance of columnar storage    inside IRIS without wrapping it to some foreign platform that is not my world   
  • In addition, I do not want to measure network performance between 2 containers,     but inside a closed IRIS environment that I have fully under my control
  • Even the use of SMP or some other browser-based presentation has some influence that I want to avoid.
  • Measuring should be as close to the core as possible. So I flagged it NATIVE. Some people might feel it is ABORIGINAL.
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Article Robert Cemper · Feb 24, 2024 2m read

I want to address the nasty problems about reading a flat text in ASCII, UTF*
explicitly excluding HTML, EBCDIC, and other encoding.
According to Wikipedia there are at least 8 variations of control characters.

  • CR+LF is typical for Windows
  • LF is typical for the Linux/UNIX world
  • CR is Mac's favorite

As you can deduct from the names the inspiration comes from mechanical typewriters.

In IRIS* similar as in Caché or Ensemble or .

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Article Robert Cemper · Feb 18, 2024 2m read

If one of your packages on OEX receives a review you get notified by OEX only of YOUR own package.   
The rating reflects the experience of the reviewer with the status found at the time of review.   
It is kind of a snapshot and might have changed meanwhile.   
Reviews by other members of the community are marked by * in the last column.

I also placed a bunch of Pull Requests on GitHub when I found a problem I could fix.    
Some were accepted and merged, and some were just ignored.     
So if you made a major change and expect a changed review just let me know.

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