As you know in Caché / IRIS you have the possibility to define a property as Multidimensional as documented here:
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim
and the explanation of how to use it
https://docs.intersystems.com/iris20201/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GOBJ_proplit#GOBJ_proplit_multidim_values

Though the access is quite comfortable (in traditional COS sense) there are 2 main restrictions that hurt:

#1) It is not saved to disk unless your application includes code to save it specifically.
#2) It cannot be stored in or exposed through SQL tables
there are some more
I'll show how to overcome these limits

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Article
· Apr 26, 2020 5m read
Materialized Views

A VIEW in SQL is basically a prepared SQL statement.
It has to be executed and assembled like any other SQL query.
MATERIALIZED VIEW means that the content is collected before hands and can be retrieved rather fast.
I saw the concept first with my favorite competitor named O* and they made a lot of noise about it.

{ favorite: because I could win every benchmark against them devil }

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Article
· Apr 25, 2020 2m read
Static WHERE Conditions

The typical WHERE condition in SQL relates mostly to some content of the rows you work on.
So it needs to be calculated and checked for each row you access.
Differently (and that's why I named it STATIC) is a WHERE condition that is independent of the rows you access.

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Article
· Apr 4, 2020 1m read
Websocket Echo server IRIS

In Caché you had an example of a WebSocket Server in namespace SAMPLES
With IRIS the samples are gone and require additional installation effort.

So I refurbished the code with some useful additions:

  • independent of namespace
  • timeout control from client
  • readable communication log

This contains 2 classes:

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Article
· Dec 9, 2019 1m read
SUDOKU demo

A demo in traditional style COS

This was written based on a previous trial in .XLS
It is far from being perfect. Rather a challenge for
improvement in all directions (code, interface, ...)
So anyone feel invited to make it better.

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Question
· Oct 31, 2019
Unknown Licensing Message ?

I find in my message.log an entry I've never seen before:

10/31/19-16:00:22:562 (9056) 0 InterSystems IRIS license file (iris.key) must be validated with License Server.

What does it try to tell me?
Is there any action expected?

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Question
· Sep 12, 2019
Features of *ENSTEMP

ENSTEMP was addressed already some time ago;
Article: Preventing Globals From Getting Journaled (Continued from How do I Minimize My Journals)

and is also in public documentation
Where InterSystems IRIS Stores Temporary Production Data

Though I'd like to understand if this is just naming a non-journaled DB
or are there also typical features of CACHETEMP / IRISTEMP related to it:

  • automatic clean-up at system startup
  • keeping Global Buffers in memory as long as possible
  • late writing to the storage file

In other words is it a 2nd, 3rd, .. fully feature blown IRISTEMP ?

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IRIS offers Durable %SYS Directory as a highly useful feature for working with containers.

Before inventing the wheel once more I'd like to know if a similar feature also exists for Caché / Ensemble.
Official documentation is quite silent about.
Though I have some names in mind that might know more about ( @Luca Ravazzolo ? @Dmitry Maslennikov ? @Eduard Lebedyuk ? )

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Article
· Jun 10, 2019 1m read
more usefull Object Dump

During testing your code you are often confronted with the need to examine
the actual content of an object. Either using ZWRITE or $system.OBJ.Dump()
you get a picture of simple properties as "--- attribute values ---"
while "--- swizzled references ---" are more confusing than informative
and with "--- calculated references ---" you are just left in the lurch.

This small helper class allows you to dump an object to terminal or
e.g in background to some stream for later review.
By default, you see just properties with content,

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Article
· Jun 5, 2019 1m read
Using Interjob Communication (IJC)

Earlier I've written about command pipes.
This is the internal variant of a PIPE.

To make this more tangible and visible for you I prepared a small example
The scenario is to run a monitoring process that receives
input from an unknown number of sensors. (Could be Lab equipment or similar.)

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Article
· May 30, 2019 2m read
BackgroundJobs over ECP

Running a Background Job using the JOB command is a well-known feature.
Using ECP to distribute databases to several servers is also well-known.
But using the combination of both to run a process on a different server
seems to be a rare case.

Sure there are enough other ways to start a remote job, but the special
combination with ECP where the application server starts a process on a
data server without additional networking is worth to be remembered.

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Article
· May 29, 2019 1m read
Simple Remote Server Control

This example is extracted from a long-running installation.
The purpose is to have simple monitoring of several servers at a rather primitive level.
Just slightly more intelligent than a raw PING. But still easy to integrate.
It avoids the overkill of information you are often confronted with while you are just
interested in the number of active processes or similar basic figures.
The example shows a basic skeleton that might be easily filled by your real needs.

It consists of 3 sections:

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Article
· Feb 8, 2019 2m read
Client Websockets based CSP

The Caché / Ensemble standard distribution contains in namespace SAMPLES
a nice example of a CSP page consuming WebService as a Client.
I have modified it not only to display the replies but to feed them back into a Global.
I used the classic Hyperevent to achieve this. The replies end up as a log in global^WSREPLY.
When there is no input anymore the page closes and goes away.

There are 2 versions with visible and hidden display during operation.
dc.WSCSP.reverseVerbose.cls and dc.WSCSP.reverseHidden.cls

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