When creating a PRA (Privileged Routine Application; which by the way is not relevant just for Routines but also for Classes/Methods), it is important to make sure you include a new $ROLES, before calling

In Studio you could open a class directly via it's name, without having to traverse the package tree with multiple clicks until arriving at the desired class.

You would Ctrl + O or (File -> Open) and be able to simply type in the class name, for example:

You press Enter, and viola - the class is opened.

How do you achieve this in VSCode?

Another VSCode "Tips & Tricks" entry -

Do you want to see this option in VSCode?

For the benefit of those who want to use the Document Database (DocDB) capabilities within InterSystems IRIS, and specifically the REST API it provides, I put together a Postman Collection that provides samples for several basic calls.

For example:

You might have encountered this and not known how to prevent it, or perhaps not even noticed it...

While reviewing our documentation for our ^pButtons (in IRIS renamed as ^SystemPerformance) performance monitoring utility, a customer told me: "I understand all of this, but I wish it could be simpler… easier to define profiles, manage them etc.".

After this session I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and provide some easier human interface for this.

The first step in this was to wrap a class-based API to the existing pButtons routine.

I was also able to add some more "features" like showing what profiles are currently running, their time remaining to run, previously running processes and more.

The next step was to add on top of this API, a REST API class.

With this artifact (a pButtons REST API) in hand, one can go ahead and build a modern UI on top of that.

For example -

Coming back to the topic of how to minimize journals.

Question:

My journal files are growing rapidly - what could be the cause? How can I minimize the phenomena?

One of the topics that comes up often when managing Ensemble productions is disk space:

The database (the CACHE.DAT file) grows in a rate that was unexpected; or the Journal files build up at a fast pace; or the database grows continuously though the system has a scheduled purge of the Ensemble runtime data.

It would have been better if these kind of phenomena would have been observed and accounted for yet at the development and testing stage rather than on a live system.

For this purpose I created a basic framework that could aid in this task.