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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Derek Robinson 00:00:03 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Product Manager Bob Kuszewski about Kubernetes and the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to the Data Points podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, we're joined by Bob Kuszewski, Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. Now about a year and a half ago, we had Luca Ravazzolo on the podcast to talk about Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform. Now, at that time, the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator wasn't even released, and lots of strides have been made in cloud technology ever since. Today, Bob will talk with us about Kubernetes and some of its common use cases, as well as how the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, or IKO, helps deploy InterSystems IRIS applications in Kubernetes clusters. And additionally, he'll also tell us a little bit about how Kubernetes compares with InterSystems Cloud Manager, or ICM. So without further ado, here's my interview with Bob.

Derek Robinson 00:01:32 All right. And welcome to the podcast Bob Kuszewski, Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. Bob, How's it going?

Bob Kuszewski 00:01:38 Good. How are you?

Derek Robinson 00:01:39 Good. Your first time on the podcast? 

Bob Kuszewski 00:01:41 It is!

Derek Robinson 00:01:42 …and we're finally back in the office here. I've been doing remote podcast interviews for a while now. So this is very refreshing to do one in person and be able to both be sitting here at the mics and have a good conversation.

Bob Kuszewski 00:01: It's exciting to be back.

Derek Robinson 00:01:54 So today we're going to be talking about Kubernetes, and specifically the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator and a few other cloud topics around the InterSystems technology stack. Over a year ago, we did a podcast episode with Luca Ravazzolo, who talked to us about Kubernetes and what it was. And in that episode, we maybe had a few hints toward the Kubernetes Operator, but it was much earlier and maybe not even released yet at that time, I think.

Bob Kuszewski 00:02:18 That's right. It wasn't out yet.

Derek Robinson 00:02:20 So we figured it was overdue to do another episode and have a good conversation about that. So, starting from the 10,000-foot view, tell us a little bit about what Kubernetes is and where its place is in the market today when it comes to cloud technologies.

Bob Kuszewski 00:02:31 Yeah. Kubernetes is this extensible open-source platform for maintaining and managing your workloads in the cloud. It is declaratively configured. It has a lot of automation built into it. This is how those websites that you go to that scale to infinity…this is how they all work. It's incredibly popular. It's really kind of taking over the world. One of the things that I love about it is that it's ubiquitous, and it's portable. So it runs on everything from edge cloud computing devices, like IOT devices—think of it that way—all the way up to giant…you know, Alibaba runs their whole website on it. You know Kelsey Hightower, who's a DevOps person, I think he's at Google Cloud now, you know, he describes it as it does all the things that the very best system administrators would do. It does automation, failover, centralized logging, monitoring, and it takes all the things that we've learned in the DevOps community and makes it default out of the box. So it's really easy to, once you get into it, it's really easy to build and grow on Kubernetes.

Derek Robinson 00:03:59 And that's also on top of, you know, we've had other podcast discussions and content where we talked about just containerization in general and the lightweight, efficient benefits of that. It's really taking that and then, like you said, taking a highly skilled system admin and everything that they would do with the deployment of those and kind of making it all work seamlessly. 

Bob Kuszewski 00:04:20. Exactly. Yeah.

Derek Robinson 00:04:22 So going to the next step a little bit there of understanding what Kubernetes is and its value, tell us about how InterSystems technology works with that. You know, basically, what is the tool that's available to be able to make that happen?

Bob Kuszewski  00:04:38 Yeah, last year we released the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator. Kubernetes Operator is a controller that extends the functionality of Kubernetes to allow you to create, configure, and manage instances of complex applications on behalf of a Kubernetes user. So the way I like to think about it is: a Kubernetes Operator automates all the best practices of what a human operator would do to create, monitor, and update an application. So the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator—we call it IKO—encapsulates all of these best practices specifically for IRIS: for how to set up IRIS, how to update IRIS, how to grow your installation of IRIS from something that starts very simple to something that's very complex, and has a lot of different servers that work together to provide this application. It does so in the Kubernetes way, so we use all of those great Kubernetes tools that are part of it.

Derek Robinson 00:05:47 So Kubernetes Operators are a concept that can exist outside of the InterSystems one. So there are other Kubernetes Operators out there that basically automate these tasks for the environment in the situation that's required. This tool is the InterSystems-specific one that allows you to do those InterSystems-specific things that a system admin might do manually if they were managing InterSystems.

Bob Kuszewski  00:06:10 Yeah, that's exactly right. So there are Kubernetes Operators for almost any application that you can think of. You know, WordPress applications, for example, there's a Kubernetes Operator that lets you just say easily, "I have a WordPress application. Here's what I'd like it to look like." And it handles all of the setup and configuration of WordPress. What we have is we have one that extends the Kubernetes API so that you can say, "Oh, create IRIS cluster." And then you give it options. There's a lot of options, but ultimately, it's very easy. It's all YAML or JSON, depending on how you want to do it. And so you can create anything from a very simple cluster to a really very complex cluster if you want to.

Derek Robinson 00:07:05 Right. Nice. So looking at how that applies in the real world, right. What are some examples? Cause that's what it sounds like to me is that you can use Kubernetes without a specified operator, right? But using, for example, the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator for using InterSystems IRIS instances, right? What are some examples and use cases where customers in the real world would be well-served or have been well-served to use the Kubernetes Operator, as opposed to just trying to manage things without an operator, just using Kubernetes and the IRIS instances?

Bob Kuszewski  00:07:37 Right. What the Operator allows you to do, is it allows you to work with IRIS without having to have as many people involved. You don't have to think about it; it allows you to—how I like to describe it—fall into the pit of success, just make it really easy to be successful with it. So we have customers who are using it in a number of ways. One that I think is very interesting is a very simple IRIS application, dealing with FHIR® messages and HL7® messages, and it is built in as part of the software that gets delivered with medical equipment. So there's a medical equipment manufacturer who I can't name, that is going to be including it right there with it. And they're using Kubernetes to manage their whole stack of all of the software, the stuff that they wrote themselves, as well as our built-in tools. So in the past, you've had to like almost ship a human operator with sophisticated equipment like this. With Kubernetes and our Kubernetes Operator, you have the ability to have that all be automated, and you just need much, much less human oversight. We also have other customers who are building, for example, SAS offering that…is using our Kubernetes Operator to—whenever a new customer comes in of a certain size—spin up a right instance of IRIS for that customer.

Derek Robinson 00:09:22 Nice, yeah. So, all those benefits that you explained, just making that available for whatever their need is, whether that is for replacing the human administrator in the scenario or the elastic scaling that you're talking about, based on the user demand, things like that. So, yeah, that's really cool.

Bob Kuszewski  00:09:37 It also lets you handle some of the things that can be tricky with manually setting up IRIS. For example, mirroring—it's a very common technique to have two mirrors for disaster- recovery purposes. With a manual setup, that's not easy to configure. It takes time. With the Kubernetes Operator, you just say mirroring equals true and it goes off and deploys it. Same with sharding. So if you have a large data application, you could split that data up across multiple physical nodes. Again, it's kind of a pain to set up manually. It's definitely doable; it's not the end of the world…but have that be automated, or to have one of the secret-sauce pieces of InterSystems IRIS that I love to talk about is ECP. And if you have ECP for compute servers, so you're offloading some of the business logic work from your main database server. Those can scale up and scale down just by changing a number in your YAML file, and you're good to go. It makes it really very easy to manage small applications, large applications, and we handle things like the web gateway or external language servers, you know, the whole breadth of what a full-blown IRIS using all the bells and whistles application could look like.

Derek Robinson 00:11:12 Right. And really one of the terms with Kubernetes that I've seen before is declarative configuration, in that you're kind of flipping it on its head and that you can, like you just said, update your definition file and, you know, Kubernetes and the Operator in this case with the, you know, things like mirroring, sharding, stuff like that, will do those things that are manual and difficult—you know, it knows how to get to that state that you've told it you want to get to.

Bob Kuszewski  00:11:34 Exactly. You just tell Kubernetes, "Hey, where do I want to be at the end of the day?" And it will make it happen. It'll make it happen in kind of the right way. 

Derek Robinson 00:11:46 That's very cool. So looking at that and seeing its use case in these containerized deployments and clusters, I'm going to backtrack a little bit to a couple of years ago when we first released InterSystems IRIS. And I remember in the learning group creating learning content around the launch of InterSystems IRIS, and one of the topics that was very popular at that time in the cloud space was InterSystems Cloud Manager, ICM. And so that is still an offering as well. And so I think one of the things that I've wondered before is the difference now with ICM and Kubernetes both in the picture, and also when customers would use one or the other. So talk a little bit about that comparison and where each one really has its sweet spot for customers.

Bob Kuszewski  00:12:28 Yeah. ICM is the cloud manager that's great for if you want to deploy onto VMs, and you're using one of the big cloud providers. So it's great…it works. It's beautiful. It does a lot of the same things. It lets you easily…through configuration….say, I want to set up a very small or very complex IRIS cluster, and it'll set all of that up. So this is great for organizations that are not able to, or not ready yet for embracing Kubernetes as a whole. For organizations that are using Kubernetes, it's a little bit different, right? You have to have a containerized application, which is actually a great thing. It makes it easy to move from dev to QA to production really easily, but it does take some time, and there's some learning involved there. So, you know, Kubernetes is great, and it does a lot of the same things, with IKO, that you can do with ICM.

Derek Robinson 00:13:41 Okay. So yeah, so there's, there's certainly sounds like there's some overlap there. And I know even from what I remember early in ICM, creating learning content there, you could have containerized applications there as well, but focusing on a VM-based architecture.

Bob Kuszewski  00:13:55 Yeah, exactly. You're still deploying VMs; it's just, those VMs would run in your container rather than something like Kubernetes, which is built around that.

Derek Robinson 00:14:07 Exactly, right. Cool. So to summarize and wrap up, you know, a lot of interesting and cool stuff, both having been released and still sounds like maybe on the way, what are some other cool things or notable things to look for in the future when it comes to these cloud developments in the InterSystems technology stack?

Bob Kuszewski  00:14:24 Yeah, we've got a lot of things going on right now, right? We're continuing to invest in ICM as well as IKO. You know, I believe that Kubernetes is really the future of how sophisticated applications get deployed, both in the cloud, but also an edge computing devices and, you know, in hybrid situations of all sorts and flavors. In addition to that, you know, we are expanding and investing in certain SAS offerings. We recently announced our FHIR Accelerator service, and we're building out our built-in interoperability features to make it easy to integrate with a wide range of cloud services like S3, KAFKA, those sorts of things. We're making these great investments and I'm really, really excited to share some of them with you in the future. Just not today!

Derek Robinson 00:15:22 Right, right. Got to leave little bit of intrigue always. So, what sounds like a lot of cool stuff. And of course, I assume this year at Virtual Summit as well, there'll probably be a lot of content around these different cloud areas. So definitely looking forward to it. So Bob, thank you so much for joining us. We'll have you on next time.

Derek Robinson 00:15:44 Thanks again to Bob for joining us to talk about Kubernetes. When it comes to learning Kubernetes, a lot of that learning curve is not so InterSystems-specific. There are lots of resources out there, including Kubernetes' own documentation from kubernetes.io, that does a great job laying out the foundation of Kubernetes knowledge. Once you have that foundation, you'll be more equipped to dive into using the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator to deploy InterSystems IRIS in your clusters. Of course, you can always reach out to your sales engineer for more information about trying the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator in your own deployments. That'll do it for Episode 20. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Product Manager Benjamin De Boe about what's new and noteworthy in the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to the Data Points podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, I'm welcoming back a familiar guest, if you're a regular listener of the podcast, and that is Benjamin De Boe. Benjamin will talk to us about the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS. From analytics to business intelligence, to machine learning, to development gateways into FHIR improvements, Benjamin will walk us through all of the latest and greatest from the most recent release of InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:01:12 All right, and welcome to the podcast, Benjamin De Boe, making what I think is your third podcast appearance now. So Benjamin, thanks for joining us.

Benjamin De Boe 00:01:19 Pleasure, Derek. Thanks for having this.

Derek Robinson 00:01:22 So today we're going to talk about the 2021.1 release of InterSystems IRIS, and kind of talk about what's in that, and what's exciting and what should be, you know, getting people's attention with this release. So, let's say I see you today in the elevator. You have 10 seconds to give me the rundown of what's new in this release of InterSystems IRIS. What would you say?

Benjamin De Boe 00:01:40 That's unfair, you're on one of the highest floors of the building (laughs), but anyway. So I think the most important thing, or the most important leap forward that we made in this release is what we did in analytics. We've made really a lot of investments. We've introduced InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics, which is a new add-on capability in this release. We've made IntegratedML, which we've talked about before, now a core part of the standard release. And we've also significantly upped our game in SQL to support analytical queries.

Derek Robinson 00:02:09 Nice, nice. So you clocked in just in time there, but let's say now we're getting off at the same floor and you have a few more seconds to talk about some of this in more detail. So tell us a little bit about Adaptive Analytics. I know this has been mentioned; in one of our recent episodes, we talked about analytics and AI. Give us a little bit more of a breakdown of Adaptive Analytics, 'cause that's one of the big new things that pops out at me in that ten-second description.

Benjamin De Boe 00:02:30 Yeah, absolutely, and it's probably worth its own dedicated podcast in a while, but essentially it enables customer to define their logical data model on top of data that's in their IRIS database, in business terms: so business measures, business dimensions, but it makes sense to business users and analysts. And then the technology in Adaptive Analytics takes care of mapping those business measures and business dimensions to whichever native format, their preferred tool of the day, for end-user data visualization or BI, prefers, but that could be Tableau, Power BI, even Excel, but also, many, many other BI tools. So because Adaptive Analytics takes care of that mapping of the business model to what those tools can represent and can show to them natively, time to insight for those end users.

Benjamin De Boe 00:03:24 And then the best part for me as a techie, is why we're calling it adaptive. So Adaptive Analytics will not just make sure that it all looks splendid from a business perspective, but under the hood, it will automatically monitor the queries that go through this business model. And while initially it will map those queries directly to the s, it will start looking for frequent patterns and it will pre-aggregate interim results for those; it will cache query results for those in a very smart way so that it can serve futureoff those prebuilt structure, so that it can support many more users, much more data, much more effectively. That's all going totally autonomous; it's a really cool piece of technology.

Derek Robinson 00:04:10 Right. Nice. And, you know, I think, when we had Carmen on a few episodes ago, we talked a little bit about, the differences between like a partnership and a homegrown technology in some of these areas. And so a lot of what you mentioned there also reminds me of kind of the business intelligence area, where we have InterSystems IRIS BI. So, talk a little bit about how that relates between Adaptive Analytics and InterSystems IRIS BI.

Benjamin De Boe 00:04:33 Yeah. That's a very appropriate question because it sounds very similar indeed. And indeed, what you would do with Adaptive Analytics is also business intelligence. Our pre-existing BI engine, which many will probably still know under its older name DeepSee, is entirely embedded in InterSystems IRIS, from the low-level interaction with sourcethrough our own custom-built , all the way up to the data visualization part, analyzer dashboards. That's all embedded inside InterSystems IRIS. And that embedded model enables us to do a couple of really cool things, so we can make sure that your IRIS BI cubes always show you real-time data because we keep them automatically in sync with the low-level data structure . We can make sure that if you're building an application on InterSystems IRIS, that in that application, you can also render a couple of charts or entire dashboards that are also customized according to your application…and just constantly, so that if you're drilling down in a BI view to particular lists of order, you can add a button that immediately goes through your order processing system to make sure that those orders are archived or put on the mail. That model is really applicable to application partners that want to keep their deployments simple, and just have powerful analytics embedded into those applications. Now with Adaptive Analytics, we're targeting a slightly different audience. So I already mentioned that we're catering to business users that may use a variety of other third-party tools: Tableau, Power BI, Excel, et cetera. So you may be working in a big organization that has a really large data warehouse that needs to support those different user groups, each with their own preferred tool. So that's where Adaptive Analytics can provide exactly that capability. So making sure that those business users, their business models, and the tools that they prefer to work with…again, they serve different use cases. So having introduced Adaptive Analytics doesn't mean that we're letting go of InterSystems IRIS BI. Actually, if you are an IRIS BI user, you'll see that we made a couple of really nice performance enhancements in this release, but they're just two separate use cases. In the next release, we'll also be looking for more interplay between the two.

Derek Robinson 00:06:58 Nice. Yeah. And that, that is another kind of theme of what we talked about a couple episodes ago about these different technologies working together and fitting different use cases for different customers. So going back kind of to the, the rundown you gave before, you mentioned a little bit about IntegratedML, so tell us what's new in that area.

Benjamin De Boe 00:07:16 Yeah. Last fall we did release IntegratedML on a 2020.3-based kit. And now, we're making it part of the main release, of our .1 release, which is the extended maintenance release, without really making it a standard part of the kit. What IntegratedML offers, Tom Dyar and our team already had a podcast specifically devoted to this project. But in a nutshell, the idea of IntegratedML is that it offers a simple SQL interface .

Derek Robinson 00:07:54 Right. Nice. And so I think kind of packaging those together and, you know, making it streamlined for people to be able to take advantage of all those features. So that sounds like a lot of analytic stuff and a lot of stuff, and between you, Carmen, and Tom, the product managers that we talked to last time, a lot in your area. So, tell us a little bit about what else might have happened in other areas of the product.

Benjamin De Boe 00:08:16 What do you mean, what else? (laughs) It would be a little unfair to monopolize everything with analytics. But one of the other main highlights of this release is our support for Kubernetes. If you're a system administrator and you managed to get your work done in less than 80 hours a week, you're probably using it. You're probably using Kubernetes because software environments really have gotten complex to configure and manage. And Kubernetes is a tool, an open-source tool, that helps you with that. And it's got a huge ecosystem and support by all major cloud vendors through dedicated Kubernetes services. So what Kubernetes does is it facilitates the declarative configuration and automation of containerized workloads. That's a mouthful, but what it means is that it helps you to dynamically scale and make your environments highly available by writing simple configuration files rather than operating five different interfaces with 20,000 buttons each. So how do we support Kubernetes? We've released the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator, which is available with InterSystems IRIS 2021.1. And it extends Kubernetes with best practices with Operator that can help automate the management of an InterSystems IRIS cluster. So it embeds best practices, it embeds boilerplate stuff to make everything smoother and really work well, so that you don't even have to do all of that piping of that very simple text file.

Derek Robinson 00:09:47 Right, right. Nice. Yeah. And I think over a year ago, we did a podcast episode about Kubernetes the technology, but not so much about the InterSystems Kubernetes Operator. So good to know that that's one of the things that people can look for in this release. So kind of along that topic, does that mean, would you say that customers should now pretty much all be using Kubernetes as part of their technology stack within IRIS?  

Benjamin De Boe 00:10:10 I think it's worth a look for every system administrator, but it's absolutely not enough. With prior products, such as InterSystems Cloud Manager, we offered this as an add-on to make your life easier. Now with IKO, we actually had to make some of the configuration effort (remember those 20,000 buttons in a configuration interface). We've had to make our own a little more straightforward for IKO to just work. So you've probably noticed the CPF merge pilot, some of the things that we've done in the past year, to make it easier to configure InterSystems IRIS. So administrators can leverage those features in their own environments, in their own scripts, and their own other configuration utilities that they prefer to work with.

Derek Robinson 00:11:00 Cool. So it sounds like a lot of good stuff for analysts, system admins. How about developers? What in this release really jumps out at them and can be beneficial for them?

Benjamin De Boe 00:11:09 It's definitely one of our favorite audiences with InterSystems IRIS. As usual, we've made a lot of enhancements for them, both of the client-side libraries, as well as on the server side. On the client side, we've done a lot of small things such as .Net Core support, .Net Core 2.1 support, which may be very big. We've added connection pooling for JDBC and have some really good feedback from early adopters on that. And also some completeness work on the native APIs, but then on the server side is probably where the biggest changes and biggest enhancements are. So many of you will probably be familiar with our gateway technology, which allows you to implement business logic in Java or business logic in .Net, and then call it from ObjectScript, or call it from your business processes.

Benjamin De Boe 00:12:00 So we've added Python and R to that list, and we've significantly improved the manageability of those gateways. So we've turned them now into an external language server that will start automatically; they are declaratively configured, so it sounds a little bit like the Kubernetes story that we just came off. And we've also made it very easy for those gateways to call back into InterSystems IRIS using re-entrance connection—a bit of a tricky term, but what it means is that if you're invoking formal text scripts in Java code, that is doing some fancy stuff, that now the Java code can just open up a connection back to IRIS that's using the exact same credentials, exact same security context privileges, without you having to do anything. So that makes that interplay between your IRIS native codes and then the code running on your external language server, much, much smoother, and it just enables you to build nicer hybrid applications.

Derek Robinson 00:13:03 Nice, nice. So it sounds like we're kind of all in here on a modern app development with these improvements and kind of enhancements.

Benjamin De Boe 00:13:10 Yep, absolutely. And not just for the app development itself, but also for managing the APIs to which you expose them. So we've also released a new version of InterSystems API Manager, Version 2.3, which now has hybrid mode, which helps you deploy highly scalable and highly available environments. We've also added Ksupport and made some general enhancements to the overall user experience.

Derek Robinson 00:13:38 Right, right. Nice. So it sounds like, you just listed off a bunch of stuff that we could do future episodes on. So, that's also good to hear. So, shifting gears a little bit, we've talked mostly about really the data platform side of things. What is notable in the healthcare space for this release?

Benjamin De Boe 00:13:55 As usual, we've also invested a lot in our healthcare support, specifically in FHIR support. So in prior releases, we already supported FHIR and Smart on FHIR applications, both in the client and server mode, but now for IRIS for Health and HealthShare Health Connect, which were also part of this release, we've really added a lot of new FHIR-related capabilities, especially if you get the continuous delivery releases for the 2020.2, .3, and .4 that we've released in the meantime. So if you hadn't tuned into those, make sure to look for their launch webinars and release notes as well. But now if you want to skip all of that, so we've got support for So that's really upping our game for FHIR. Also, to help customers migrate to our platform, we've extended the HL7 migration toolkit to automatically convert confirmation logic that was developed on third-party platforms, Cloverleaf, Delegate, or eGate. So anything you did on those interface engines can now be migrated automatically to HealthShare Health Connect or IRIS for Health.

Derek Robinson 00:15:15 Right, right. Nice. That's great stuff. So last question here, you know, one of the things that I feel like comes up with every new release really is the question, what does this mean for existing Caché and Ensemble customers that might be out there?

Benjamin De Boe 00:15:29 It's just a ton of new reasons to switch over to InterSystems IRIS. We think many of our customers that are still on Caché or Ensemble will be migrating to this release. So we've been on the market with InterSystems IRIS for about three years now. And many customers and partners have already made a jump, including our biggest partner, Epic, who has their first customers running live on InterSystems IRIS for a while now. So we offer tools to convert existing instances to IRIS, and to help you through this migration, we also have staff on hand to advise as appropriate. And at the other end of the migration, there's a faster, more robust, more secure, and more scalable platform waiting for you. So your mileage may vary, but we've seen customers' throughput increase by 10% up to a hundred percent just from upgrading from Caché and Ensemble 2018.1 to the latest IRIS releases. And then they even have to start looking at all of the new stuff that we added in the meantime into IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:16:29 Right. Right. So, yeah. You know, with each release, it feels like there's just more and more that adds up, and more reasons for people to move to the IRIS platform and to be able to take advantage of all these features. So, Benjamin, thanks so much for joining us again, and I'm sure we'll have you on soon about some of these topics that you mentioned as well.

Benjamin De Boe 00:16:47  My pleasure. Thanks, Derek!

Derek Robinson 00:16:54 Thanks again to Benjamin for joining us. If you enjoy hearing Benjamin break down our product stack, definitely check out Episode 17 from this spring, when he helped us to dive into the analytics and AI part of the InterSystems technology stack. Keep an eye out for more materials around this most recent release, and as always, check out learning.intersystems.com as well. One notable change we made recently on the Learning site has been the addition of a Learn the Latest button on the homepage. This will show you items in the learning catalog that have been released within the last 90 days. So it's a great way to know if we've published a new video, or course, or any other online materials. That'll do it for episode 19. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

To learn more about the developer contest for the FHIR Accelerator Service, see here: https://community.intersystems.com/post/intersystems-fhir-accelerator-programming-contest

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Product Managers Carmen Logue, Benjamin De Boe, and Thomas Dyar about the overall analytics and AI technology stack at InterSystems, and how these products fit together.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to the Data Points podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, we have a bit of a roundtable discussion for you with three guests that have each appeared on prior episodes of Data Points: Carmen Logue, Benjamin De Boe, and Thomas Dyar. These three are all Product Managers or specialists for different product and feature areas within the analytics and AI part of the InterSystems technology stack. In our conversation, we'll talk about what technologies exist in this area, how they fit together, how some customers may use these features, and more.

Derek Robinson 00:01:15 Alright, so Carmen, Benjamin and Tom, thank you all for joining us on the podcast today. Why don't we start by introducing yourselves? I know you've all been on the podcast before in past episodes, but, Carmen, we'll start with you.

Carmen Logue 00:01:24 Sure. Good to be here again. Yeah. My name is Carmen Logue, and I'm a Product Manager on the Database Platforms team here at InterSystems. And my focus is really on the kind of business intelligence reporting aspect of things, so that set of users.

Derek Robinson 00:01:42 Cool. Benjamin?

Benjamin De Boe 00:01:44 Hi, and thanks for having us. So my name is Benjamin De Boe. I've been with InterSystems for 10, almost 11 years, and I look after, within the Data Platforms Product Management team to look after data management subjects.

Thomas Dyar 00:01:59 Yeah, my name is Tom Dyar, and I'm a Product Specialist, and I work in the same team as Carmen and Benjamin, but focusing on machine learning and AI within our database platform product.

Derek Robinson  00:02:13 Nice, great. And so thank you all again for joining us. And of course we're still doing these remote interviews after all this time, but hopefully before long, we'll be able to have a real roundtable in person again, in our office. But so, starting with you, Benjamin, we're going to be talking about our AI and analytics offering within the InterSystems technology stack today. So, let's start out with just telling us a little bit about, give us a little overview of the AI and analytics offering that we have.

Benjamin De Boe  00:02:38 It'll be one big overview today. Let's start with the beginning and maybe a little bit of a history because in a different life, I would have been a history teacher because we really evolved quite a bit over the past, say, four or five years. So, that has been an active process because we really started thinking about analytics and AI in a different way. So previously—again, say up to four or five years ago—we typically work closely with, development shops, with application partners that develop their applications, and we embedded select analytics capabilities inside of our platform so that they could take advantage of that in their application. So our audience was largely developers that then built something for their customers and those customers that went all the way from hospital information systems, lab systems to, outright coordination systems.

Benjamin De Boe 00:03:36 But now we've really started to cater more directly to a much broader audience of end customers that includes still developers, but also data scientists, data engineers, analysts, and also, totally nontechnical people. So that means that we've tried to really get under the skin of these people and try to understand how they think, what they need, and make sure that we have the solutions, or we have the technology in our platform to serve those people's use cases. And that very often meant that we went higher up the stack, that we have to offer more visually appealing, more, clients, kind of tools. And you could think of that as . And so that's really how we've been evolving our platform from a couple of embedded technologies that were really closely embedded, close to the data, at very high performance, very robust, to a more broader set that is still of course, made to be very robust and very dependable, but now we're also catering to a lot of end-user types directly. And we think that also benefits these application partners because they now also have a broader set of options to offer to their customers.

Derek Robinson 00:04:53 Right, right. Nice. And so when you look at kind of building that out to be for the users really end to end and offer everything that they need, does that mean that our partners and customers really kind of have to stick to the selected solutions that we offer, or is there more that they can choose from?

Carmen Logue 00:05:08 Oh, they don't have to stick to what we offer at all. They can use our choices, particularly we have some customers who like to have one organization that they work with, and have one set of support number and that kind of thing. But if you've followed InterSystems over the last years, you've probably heard the term freedom of choice, which is something that we've used in a number of ways, but certainly the goal was to provide our customers with access to the tools that they want to use. So it's kind of a, we call it a native plus open approach, which is having some things that are embedded in the platform developed here at InterSystems, like our InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence, our OLAP engine and NLP tool, which are embedded into the product, but also to make sure that we can support other tools by supporting key standards like MDX and PMML and UIMA so that we can be interoperable with those tools. And, so that's really the goal there. And I think as Benjamin said, over the last year or so, we've kind of looked up or moved up the stack, I guess, to looking at how the business users are interacting with our technology, something that's still relatively new, but things like InterSystems Reports, where it's getting information all the way to the end user about what's happening with their data.

Derek Robinson 00:06:41 Right, right. Nice. And I think, you know, us in the learning group have experienced this as well. Like as we have progressed our technology stack over the years, right? It can become a lot to keep track of, like what is in each umbrella of the entire stack. So, I know each of the three of you kind of have your products and features that are in your specialty areas. So, Carmen starting with you, kind just for the users that might have been exposed to these different features and products within InterSystems, they've seen it on the learning site or the corporate site, what features fit into this AI in analytics umbrella, at least within your area? And then we can also ask Benjamin and Tom the same question.

Carmen Logue 00:07:20 Yeah, that sounds great. And yeah, I guess we have made things a little more exciting for you guys, haven't we, by giving you more to talk about? So I mentioned at the start that, you know, my focus is on kind of business intelligence and reporting, and that sort of stuff. So I think of the kind of users that I think about are analysts and data modelers, all the way to the business user, who's interacting with something like Tableau or Power BI on the desktop. And so these people are often, they're kind of labeled as nontechnical, but in some ways they have to, you know, they have work to do to understand the data and be able to visualize it in a way that makes sense to their end consumers and the people who are making business decisions with it. So the things that I look after are InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence, or BI, formerly known as DeepSee; InterSystems Reports, which has now been available for about a year; third-party integrations with, Power BI and Tableau and that sort of thing. And then very soon I'm very excited about that with, with our , we will be including Adaptive Analytics, which is basically a layer in between InterSystems IRIS and those BI tools, to allow you to do some common data modeling and query acceleration. So, yeah, those are the things that I look after.

Derek Robinson 00:08:51 Nice, nice. That's great. And I think we had recently some Adaptive Analytics content coming out; I know some of my colleagues worked on that in the learning groups. That's great. Benjamin, what about yours?

Benjamin De Boe 00:09:02 Well, I'd like to think more about a second category of users that are not, that are typically more technical folks. So it's really data professionals, such as data scientists, data engineers. So people who are really very much hands-on with the data itself and are the end consumers of the of the . So maybe they built things for the personas that Carmen was talking about. For example, could be that they're building a predictive model, or they're building a particular subset of the data mountain, or a data pipeline that feeds the data warehouse. So these typically rolled-up-sleeves kind of folks, they would be using capabilities such as our InterSystems IRIS text analytics capabilities, the Apache Spark connector to access data that's stored on IRIS from Apache Spark. Some of the stuff that we've been adding recently to our SQL engine, also fits this group of users. And if you happen to have watched the session that we presented at Virtual Summit last year, about our integration with Alteryx, that's another example an integration or a combination of products that cater specifically to these data professionals, so that although we specifically work with Alteryx to offer nontechnical people or less technical people also, the ability to get really hands-on with complicated data.

Derek Robinson 00:10:34 Right, right. Nice. And so it sounds like in that answer, you've sort begun the transition to what I'm about to ask Tom about, which is sort of that AI and ML part that we haven't really gotten into quite yet. So I think Tom, that's your area, tell us a little bit about the products that are in that spot of the umbrella basically, and where the impact is there.

Thomas Dyar 00:10:53 Yeah, thanks. So, you know, one of the groups that we're looking at to, to kind of enable with this AI and machine learning, are even our more traditional kind of audience, that could be developers that know SQL, know the data, but they're really trying to just use the insights from a predictive model within their applications or workflows. And for that, they can use integratedML. It might be a model that was developed with a lot of input from the data scientists and the other groups that we're talking about here, but then when they actually want to use it, IntegratedML with SQL makes it very simple to use that model. And we support PMML as well in that workflow. So even if that model was developed in a completely different data science environment, you can use it within these mission-critical applications that are your everyday data flow, that's that this kind that developer audience really needs to rely on. So, we're going after, you know, AI and ML from a very practical viewpoint to try to overcome some of the challenges that people typically have in actually developing an application that uses a machine learning model.

Derek Robinson 00:12:14 Right, right. Nice. And, you know, I think that speaks to the evolution of this entire kind of umbrella of products and features, capping it off with that, really all the way through the machine learning and AI element of it, making it accessible to people that weren't previously experts there. Tom, kind following up on that a little bit, can you talk about the benefit? So, you know, we've run through these features, right? What is really the benefit for somebody to use InterSystems stack of analytics and AI features and products, versus using their own things like we talked about earlier with third-party tools and everything, like what's the benefit of really basing your analytics and AI approach around the InterSystems stack?

Thomas Dyar 00:12:52 Well, as Carmen mentioned, you know, there's that real fundamental aspect of us being open and also providing some functionality built in. We're also doing…getting back to IntegratedML, we're preconfiguring a lot of frameworks that are conflicts to set up and install, and work together with all of your other components of your larger system. So that know-how, and then supporting that with a single phone number and a consistent view of our customer can really make the difference in making it easy to work with us. We hear that in a lot of different metrics, that, from our customers. And so that's a really nice thing about working with us, and also working for InterSystems as an employee, it's unique. And another thing I wanted to mention, for that developer audience, for people that are building systems, we're coming out with embedded Python support within our platform so that people will be able to write server-side, and very complex applications just using Python and being able to go back and forth between our native ObjectScript and Python code, as we roll this out in the future. So that's an exciting thing for people that are really trying to have one central kind of application development environment. Python is a critical, part of many ecosystems and provides a lot of functionality, a lot of different libraries. So it's important that we support that.

Derek Robinson 00:14:31 Yeah. And we've actually had some discussions, I think embedded Python could be a future episode, as we look at the development of these products and features. So we've had some discussions about that, for sure. Kind of building off of one of the things you said about being, you know, one of the advantages is being open and being able to connect with other technologies. And so I want to revisit Carmen, your area of the product and feature umbrella, which, a lot of times, as I understand it, with some of these newer capabilities that are higher up on the stack, they can sometimes be partnerships versus actually homegrown technologies. Can you talk a little bit about that difference in kind of where the benefit is for a user to be able to understand what's available between each of those options?

Carmen Logue 00:15:10 Yeah, sure. And, that's I think an important question because, you know, I think as we extend into other parts of the organizations that we work with, this whole idea of open and having embedded capabilities, is important. And I think as we extend, we broaden the amount of work that our team needs to do. So in terms of building products, the other side of that is that, or the other aspect of that, is that we know that our customers have tools that they're already using, that they want to keep using. So that's important too. But I think that the decisions that we make around when to build and when to partner, are largely based in trying to get a deep understanding of what the needs are of these end-users, and also kind of building on our strengths. So InterSystems has a lot of key strengths, things that we've been working on for decades. And we want to continue to emphasize those while we add capabilities potentially more quickly with partner products in areas that are not key strengths for us, like reporting, right? I think that's a good example. Or API management, right? That's been a very successful partnership that has been around for a couple of years. And I think, you know, the reality is we've always done partnerships. They just probably haven't been quite as visible as they are now, but it does really allow us to extend the platform, get things to market more quickly, but still maintain the ability of our customers to count on InterSystems for support, for making sure these things work together, and for looking at things in the long haul. So it just simplifies for a lot of our customers and partners, the decisions that they have to make about which solutions to include. So, yeah, definitely not decisions that we take lightly. This is something that we really try to think about where our strengths are and, you know, what the end-users really need.

Derek Robinson 00:17:23 So definitely. Yeah.

Benjamin De Boe 00:17:24 And also, where does it fit with the other party? Because we look at these in isolation, each time, not just that they're technology, but also if there is a business fit, if these are people that are in it for the long run, just like us. This is really focused on, are we doing the target users a favor by offering this as a combined package? That's really what we're aiming for with these partnerships. And I think API management, reports have been great examples of how we can combine the strengths of our data platform with a particular complementary capability that our customers—our customers that we know well—were looking for. So those are really good examples where it's been working excellently.

Derek Robinson 00:18:16 Yeah. And just to add one more, and I know that that is in your ballpark, Tom, is like our partnership with Data Robot, for example, where another partner has good experience and expertise in machine learning, and we can roll that in with the service and products that we offer, right?

Thomas Dyar 00:18:32 Yeah, absolutely. Data Robot is a category leader, a creator of a whole category of auto ML for enterprise. So they're really, they know their stuff in machine learning, and we have a seamless integration, and many different ways that we can support getting data that people aggregate normalized in our platform and then utilize, get insights, drive predictions using Data Robot machine learning models that they can create. So it really can work well.

Derek Robinson 00:19:07 Right. For sure. So, looking at kind of all of those partnerships and technologies that we've made ourselves, it can be a lot to look at everything that's available. And I know Carmen, you had mentioned in your last answer there kind of identifying what solutions are right to use for a given person. So, Benjamin, kind of looking at what a typical customer might be using, are they using everything that we have, or are they using a subset, kind of one thing? What's the typical usage for a customer within this entire umbrella of analytics and AI products and features?

Benjamin De Boe 00:19:40 It would be great if there would be a customer that uses everything. But it's like walking into a home improvement store. You don't need a thing from each and every aisle. You may think that you need something. Or if I think that I need something from every aisle, but usually it really comes down to the scenario that they're after. So if you are a supply chain management application developer, and you want the real-time view on where your goods are, then InterSystems IRIS BI is the perfect solution for that because of the of interaction with our persistent data. It will give you exactly that. If you are a big investment bank who needs to cater to a very broad audience that uses different tools already, and you really have this huge data volume that you can't possibly have indices for each and every dimension, then InterSystems IRIS Adaptive Analytics would be a terrific solution for that kind of use case. So it really depends on what you're trying to achieve. Then of course, the broader our footprint as a customer, the more likely it is that they'll be using multiple tools and we've made that they work well together, but it really depends on what you're trying to achieve.

Derek Robinson 00:20:52 Right, right. So, yeah. So I think certainly, you know, customers leveraging as much as they can and being able to maximize the benefit that they're getting out of their situation and the tools that are available to them. Tom, I know you've worked with a particular customer who does this really well, if you want to share briefly about that.

Thomas Dyar 00:21:08 Yeah. We work very closely with Bay State Health, which is a large healthcare provider in the western half of Massachusetts. And, you know, they are leveraging a whole host of our technologies with aggregating and collecting healthcare data from millions of patients, and then being able to take that data along with information that they might have about their patients, not only their history of all that, their medications and encounters in the health system, but whatever data they can bring together and try to predict things about care, about cost of care. And also in this time of COVID, being able to optimize their operations wherever they find some needs, and having a platform that can put the data together and then also develop machine learning models for these kinds of applications is really critical for them.

Derek Robinson 00:22:10 Right, right. Nice. That's awesome. So looking at everything we've talked through in all these great products and features, I wanted to end with a quick kind of, around the table here, where do you see things going next? And what's the future within this area of the product and the technology? So Carmen, we can start with you.

Carmen Logue 00:22:26 Sure. Yeah. And I'll give you a very biased to answer because I'm really excited about what's coming out with Adaptive Analytics. And so I really think that this idea of being able to use the same platform for transactional and analytic data workloads is going to be something that people, that our customers, will really be able to leverage. And I think it will show them good cost of ownership as well as additional capabilities.

Derek Robinson 00:22:56 Right. Nice Benjamin, your thoughts?

Benjamin De Boe 00:22:59 We're working on making analytical querying faster for you. So we're really excited about the preliminary results received. It's really an order of magnitude kind of improvement for these queries. So, can't promise a specific version number just yet, but stay tuned, probably around Virtual Summit, we'll have a lot more to say about this.

Derek Robinson 00:23:20 Nice. That's exciting. And Tom, what about you?

Thomas Dyar 00:23:22 Yeah, I think for IntegratedML and for machine learning within our platform, we want to support more of the variety of data, different data types that you can store and be able to learn about, as well as the volume. We want to be able to support ever-larger collections of data. So those are two very important aspects that we're going to be improving and increasing our capabilities going forward.

Derek Robinson 00:23:52 Great. So Carmen, Benjamin, and Tom, thank you so much. It's been a great overview, I think, of the entire umbrella here that we're looking at. So, looking forward to deeper dives into these in the future. So thanks for joining us.

Carmen Logue 00:24:02 Thanks for having us, Derek.

Derek Robinson 00:24:09 So thanks again to Carmen, Benjamin, and Tom for joining us for that discussion. Hopefully that provided a little more context around the products and features within the analytics and AI domain here at InterSystems. For more information, you can always refer to the main InterSystems website, intersystems.com, for information about product releases. For deeper dives into these technologies, keep an eye on learning.intersystems.com for new materials on these topics as we develop them. That'll do it for episode 17. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on this episode, I'll chat with Jeff Fried, the Director of Product Management for Data Platforms at InterSystems, about InterSystems being named a vision in Gartner's new cloud DBMS Magic Quadrant.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Hopefully you've had a happy beginning to 2021. In this episode, our first of the new year, I'll be chatting with Jeff Fried about a recognition InterSystems recently received, and what it means from a technology standpoint. Now you may have seen in other materials that InterSystems has been named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Operational Database Management Systems for the second year in a row. This has been mentioned at our Global Summits and our Virtual Summits, and it's something that InterSystems is definitely proud of. While that  recognition holds a lot of weight, there's another one that's very new related to Gartner that I'll be talking to Jeff about, and that's being named a visionary in Gartner's first ever Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems.

Derek Robinson 00:01:29 All right. And welcome to the podcast Jeff Fried, our Director of Product Management for Data Platforms here at InterSystems. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us.

Jeff Fried 00:01:36 I'm delighted, Derek. It's always good to talk to you.

Derek Robinson 00:01:37 Of course. So today we're talking about some topics around Gartner and the Magic Quadrant, specifically for Gartner. So over the past two years, both 2019 and 2020, InterSystems has been named a Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Operational Database Management Systems, or ODBMS. That info has been displayed a lot in our marketing a lot in our website, even in our learning materials, at conferences, everything else. But one of the new things for 2020 is that Gartner released their first ever Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems. And InterSystems has been named a visionary in that Magic Quadrant, which is really exciting and interesting. So as the Director of Product Management for Data Platforms, can you tell us a little bit about what that recognition means from a technology standpoint for InterSystems?

Jeff Fried 00:02:27 Sure. I'll start just by parsing what you said, which is that Gartner as a big market analyst firm has a variety of these things. The Customers' Choice is really exactly that; it's talking to customers and getting their perspective and it's really, really gratifying to get such top marks. So that's really real-world mileage. How well does our support work? How well does the product work in production? The Magic Quadrants And the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Systems is the first time.  Historically they have had a different thing for operational database, if you will, transactional stuff, and one for analytic databases, which is much more the OLAP and the analysis kind of tools. And this is the first time that they're together. And it's also the first time that it's explicitly cloud. So from a technology standpoint, that's a lot, and being a visionary there is very exciting. The analytics elements that they picked up on and highlighted, include things that we've been doing for a long time: very high speed ingest, strong security, strong workload management, but they also include areas that are a big investment for us now, such as advanced analytics or machine learning.

Derek Robinson 00:04:13 Right, right. Nice. And so, yeah, it seems like, that crosses with a lot

of the things that we've, you know, our best foot forward in many areas when it comes to IRIS and the things that we've promoted.  

Jeff Fried 00:04:26 Yeah, absolutely. The way that I think about this is that this represents recognition of success in areas that we may not have been traditionally in. I mean, InterSystems has a long and illustrious history, and we're best known for these operational transactional things, which are frankly much harder because of data integrity needs than some of the analytic cases. One of the things that Gartner does that I, as a nerd, like from the numbers standpoint, is they do divide things up then into use cases. So when you're building a platform, it's hard; we're building for builders, and they can do all kinds of things with it. But in particular, along with the Magic Quadrant, there's things called critical capabilities. So there's a set of use cases. For analytics, the new area to us, there's ratings of a bunch of capabilities and how they apply to a traditional data warehouse, to a logical data warehouse, to data science and machine learning, and to operational intelligence. And that, you know, it's all designed so customers can change the weights themselves, but the areas that are new from a technology perspective, like advanced analytics and multi-cloud, and the sort of financial governance elements, gained us a pretty strong position in logical data warehouse in areas where you have data that might be spread around and you want to use it for analytic cases, as well as nearly top of class in what's called operational intelligence, which is sort of a buzz word for being aware of what's happening in your operations, being smart about it, and being able to get both insight and action from that. The other side of this as a first-time thing was the cloud. This is explicitly cloud, and in a way it's Gardener's bias that they are highlighting that so much new business is moving to the cloud and that the complete majority, if you will, is already there. We are frankly, late to the cloud compared to some players. So there was even question in Gartner's minds about whether we should be included at all, based on their perception of what we're doing in the cloud. And then when we really got into it, they were very surprised. And frankly, I was surprised at exactly how much cloud work is really happening. We have a lot of customers that are running in the cloud. We have quite a number of partners that are running SAS services. We're rolling out our own SAS services and platform services. So even though we're late to the cloud, if you will, I think we have a very strong showing for that. And that's really what gave us a visionary position.

Derek Robinson 00:08:13 That's great. And I mean, in Learning Services, we've been involved in some of the stuff around that cloud offering as well. And you're right. It's been the last couple of years really that we've moved to having offerings on AWS and GCP and Azure and kind of things that just three or four years ago, weren't really a part of our offering at that point. But with those things in mind, what are some of those elements you see shifting in the future that will drive us more and more to cloud-friendly technologies, and how InterSystems is prepared to keep growing in that regard and be able to maintain that leader or visionary stance in that space?

Jeff Fried 00:08:50 Yeah. I'd say two things come to mind. One is a continuation of what we've already been doing. So as you mentioned, we already are present in these cloud marketplaces. It turns out that we have customers on every major cloud. And there is a very strong trend towards what are called orchestrators — ways that you can set up your system — so that given the cloud where you can add machines at will, and add resources, so that the topologies dynamically change, so that you can manage them along with your applications in a single fabric, if you will. And Kubernetes is probably by far the most common orchestrator; that's now something that every cloud has their own service, you know, there's, the Amazon Kubernetes service, the Azure Kubernetes services, the Google Kubernetes engine, they all are based upon this open-source orchestrator. So containers and Kubernetes are not just fads. And we've been investing in them for a couple of years. It's still the case that many of our customers don't really understand how to work with these technologies. And there are things that we still need to learn 'cause it's working very fast, but the path there in the market is more and more of a shift towards this kind of orchestrated architecture, and to things where you don't set up how many machines you're going to have ahead of time. You say, here's the work I need done, and the system adjusts to the work. So that's one front. The market is definitely shifting in this direction. There's a lot around server lists, or what a Lambda architecture is, that you can accommodate if you are working in one of these orchestrators. The other area is around using this and other cloud technologies to do more interesting architectural things. I mean, we're doubling down on a lot of our traditional strengths — on ingest, on high availability through mirroring, on consistency, on scale-out — but the cloud offers things like object store, low-cost facilities for storing data, that may not be fast and easy to access the way that we're used to with disks and SANs, but is good for certain classes of data. So we'll be investing in that area. It also offers much quicker access to things that you could get on prem to — what's an example of that? — GPU-based servers Because GPU's are used heavily in machine learning; it's all math. And people don't tend to buy and have GPU's lying around in their data centers, but you can get them easily in the cloud. Same thing with, you know, alternate architectures, like, there's a big push towards ARM, both at Amazon and Apple. So, we'll be taking advantage of those in a way that's still portable across cloud. So you know, one of my ground rules is that we want to have the same blueprint, the same architecture running, in whichever cloud you're running in, or on-prem. Gardner in their Magic Quadrant calls this multi-cloud, meaning, you may be running in different clouds in different geographies because of the presence or the regulations. You might not want to get too invested in any cloud provider because that's part of their game. Then you have a dependency. And I think as an independent, we are not Amazon Google or Microsoft, you have the advantage that we can work with any of them.

Derek Robinson 00:13:37 Right. And building our platform so that it can work with any of those. And to one of your earlier points, I remember actually at a prior Global Summit, one of our colleagues, Anton, and you were doing a presentation about that very topic of a machine learning model, for instance, that you need to really run some intensive training on it that requires a lot of GPU machine power, and you're not going to go buy, you know, 20 machines to do a small amount of training that you're going to do. And so being able to deploy in cloud environments to use it as needed and be able to be efficient with your spending as a business, when you're using that type of computing resource, you know, that's an important element of it as well.

Jeff Fried 00:14:14 Exactly. And Anton, I think, would be a great person to have on your podcast. And he's continued on with the SageMaker integration that we showed there. And it's a great example where you may not need GPU's permanently; you may just need to rent them for an hour.

Derek Robinson 00:14:33 So yeah, so just a final question, kind of moving into, I think you talked about this a lot already, but, you know, you mentioned Kubernetes, you mentioned kind of our being multi-cloud. Any specific features that you have kind of on the forefront or that you see as having been recently released or coming out that really play this cloud presence specifically?

Jeff Fried 00:14:53 Well, I think, our InterSystems Kubernetes operator, or IKO — rolls right off your tongue — is definitely something to highlight. We've had to do a significant amount of work sort of in the basement of the system, and on the way it's configured, in order to fit into this orchestration framework. And we released this with 2020.3. I think that might be worth having another podcast about, and it's really nice to see, we have a few customers running on it now and a lot more that are headed this way. The trick with any orchestrator, it's like…it's automation. So you have to set things up ahead of time and just like, think of automated testing. It may not be quicker for you to run the test the first time, but it's much quicker the second and third and fourth time. So, only a few of our customers are really familiar with Kubernetes in the areas that we've been working with them on, but we're running with it on some of our own systems. And we have some really big customers that are already using it. So I think that's worth a highlight.

Derek Robinson 00:16:23 Nice. So exciting stuff. And hopefully we'll continue to position ourselves well in that cloud database management system space. So, Jeff Fried, thanks so much for joining us. We'll talk to you next time.

Jeff Fried 00:16:33 Great. Thank you.

Derek Robinson 00:16:39 So many thanks to Jeff for spending some time to talk with me about being a visionary in the cloud DBMS Magic Quadrant and some of the InterSystems technologies that we will continue to see in that effort to support the journey toward a seamless and intuitive fit in the cloud. In future episodes, I think we'll definitely explore more about things like containers and the Kubernetes operator, both foundational pieces to InterSystems cloud-native approach. But for now, that'll do it for Episode 16. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, you'll hear an interview between Zack Krowiak and Raj Singh about the ObjectScript extension in Visual Studio Code.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode 15 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. If you caught our last episode, you heard about the Experience Labs that we held during Virtual Summit. If any of those caught your interest, be on the lookout — we're converting those labs into exercises that will be available in our learning catalog. So you can head over to learning.intersystems.com to check it out. In today's episode, my colleague Zack Krowiak will interview Product Manager Raj Singh. Raj is a Product Manager for the Developer Experience here at InterSystems. And one topic that falls squarely into that area is the ObjectScript extension for Visual Studio Code. This extension allows developers to work seamlessly in a familiar, free, and lightweight IDE like VS Code. So without further ado, here's Zack's interview with Raj.

Zack Krowiak 00:01:27 All right. Raj Singh, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

Raj Singh 00:01:31 Thanks for having me.

Zack Krowiak 00:01:33 Yeah, so let's get started. So could you start by talking a little bit about how this project evolved from an open-source project, with Dmitriy, to a community collaboration with InterSystems?

Raj Singh 00:01:43 Yeah, so it was, this is pretty much a new process for InterSystems. We dipped our toes in the water earlier in 2019 with some open-source releases around iKnow and some other smaller things, less visible, but tackling an IDE, which is something all of our developers touch almost every day, if not multiple times a day, was a big commitment. A lot went into that decision, but that was partly mitigated by the fact that the ObjectScript extension that Dmitriy Maslennikov had already launched, had already shown a lot of popularity. There was hundreds of installs. People were using it every day. So from that perspective, it wasn't too scary. But just from a process perspective, we bank our reputation on sterling customer support and reliability, and so those kinds of things are easier to achieve when you have more control. So going to embracing open-source introduced a lot of degrees of freedom that we didn't know if we could be comfortable with. So we went into this with a good amount of research that showed that Visual Studio Code was a really solid platform. Very popular. Developers were coming to it in droves — first development platform to garner over 50% usage rate across the whole developer ecosystem, that I've ever seen, in years and decades, probably. So there are a lot of strong signs pointing to Visual Studio Code being a terrific platform to build upon. And then we had some of those signals that the ObjectScript extension that Dmitriy had created was also a good place for us to start. And so we went into the spring with the decision to try this out, and we would see how it would go in terms of our culture fitting in with the community culture, and having that collaboration process work well. You can't know until you try it out.

Zack Krowiak 00:04:03 Wow. That's great. Thank you. And yeah, you mentioned support a

little bit there, and how this presents a unique opportunity and challenge for supporting a product because it is open source. Could you talk a little bit more about that, and how getting support for this extension works?

Raj Singh 00:04:17 Yeah. And this will be a bit confusing for us and probably a little confusing for customers, at least at first, but this there's going to be a new model for this. First of all, for

those of you who may be long-term customers, you can always do what you've always done.

Call in to WRC, talk to your favorite rep, and really get help through whatever problems you're having. But we'd also like you to consider first going to GitHub Issues and starting your support journey there. First of all, because if you're having a problem, somebody else probably is having the same problem. So you can probably get a lot of insight just immediately, in the middle of the night or whatever. You might even solve it on your own. Secondly, if you're having a problem, somebody else, even if they haven't reported an issue, is probably having the problem today or might have it in a month, and you can pay it forward and help somebody else out down the road by keeping your journey around fixing your issue in the public. So that is a lot of reasons why we should start with GitHub Issues whenever you have a problem. You definitely want to put enhancement requests on GitHub Issues, because that is where they're going to be triaged. This is a community project in the open completely. And so the project management committee, which is going to review all the enhancement requests and figure out whether or not to work on them, that's all going to happen in the open, and only things that are on GitHub Issues are going to be considered.

Zack Krowiak 00:06:04 Right. Thank you. So you go to GitHub to both put support requests and also provide your feedback, and that's all through the same streamlined approach?

Raj Singh 00:06:15 Yeah. For those of you who are GitHub veterans,  you'll get that pretty easily, but for those of you who are new to it, it may feel a little bit foreign at first, but you should quickly get comfortable with it. So issues is maybe a little bit of a misnomer; it's a place to start a discussion on a particular topic. And then as that topic evolves, it could go from a bug report to an enhancement request if you filed it wrong in the first place, or it could go the other way. The important thing is that if there's some friction in your experience, if there's some problem you're having, or something you just want to say, is great. You always go to a single place, GitHub Issues.

Zack Krowiak 00:07:04 Right. Thank you for that. And yeah, I know you also mentioned before that you can actually access that the link to the GitHub right from VS Code, if you just go to the

extensions page. So could you talk a little bit…I'm curious a lot about the different elements

of the extension, or really extensions, now — I think there is now like four extensions that are

part of a bundle. In particular I'm interested in the language server. Could you talk a little bit more about that? What's the language server's role in this ObjectScript extension bundle?

Raj Singh 00:07:35 Yeah, so the language server is really what differentiates this from what

it was six months ago. The language server is a little piece of software that sits on your

computer, on the same computer as Visual Studio Code itself. But it's a separate executable. It's a separate little process running, and it mediates communication between your IDE and your IRIS or Caché server. And what it's doing is, as you type, every single character you type, it's going and figuring out on the back end in the database, whether there's some information it can provide to make your coding experience better. So what we see, what that means, is that if you want to do code completion, variable completion, get some documentation on a built-in class, or one that you've one that you've written yourself and have already compiled to the server, all that rich information comes through the language server, constantly being in communication with the server and knowing the whole class, the whole code base that's already in the server, and how basically the language interacts with the database. So the language server is…otherwise you would have to have all the smarts right in the extension. And A, first reason why that doesn't work well is that we can't ship your code inside the extension, so that wouldn't work well. And B, it's not an extensible way to do things. It would create a huge extension for you to work with. And it would have to be versioned for, it would have to be specific for every database version. So having a language server allows us to do amazing syntax coloring. It allows us to have your coding experience tailored directly to whatever version of IRIS or Caché you're using. So whatever classes exist on that instance of the server will be exposed to your programming environment through the language server. And in the future, it will allow you to even have languages within languages within languages colored perfectly. So if you're writing SQL inside an ObjectScript routine, those will be colored separately. You might be writing a Python routine inside of an ObjectScript class that will…the Python will be colored with Python syntax, the ObjectScript will be ObjectScript. All those things will be mediated through the language server.

Zack Krowiak 00:10:20 Wow. That sounds like it's going to be a massive boost to productivity, and just making your experience as a developer so much smoother insofar as you can just see the whole code base that you're working with. And all of those, like nested syntax, colorings, as you were talking about. so, I'm curious about a couple things. First of all, if I'm coming from the days of Atelier, can I still use Atelier? Or is Atelier being deprecated?

Raj Singh 00:10:51 Atelier is definitely being deprecated or sunset. It really, VS Code already does more than you can do at the Atelier, so there really is no reason for Atelier users to stay on that platform. The VS Code environment has been so successful. We've surpassed the Atelier functionality sooner than we expected. And so the official message is definitely, if you have been using Atelier, it's time to move; it's time to migrate as quickly as possible. And we've been giving that message to people who have asked, and we haven't had any pushback. So people who have tried out both are so happy to move on from that.

Zack Krowiak 00:11:37 Right. And I can say just as a user myself, the difference between the challenges of even just installing Atelier, on my version of Eclipse versus VS Code, it's night

and day getting VS Code up and running, and my IDE was, you know, a matter of two buttons,

and it was running. Now on the other side of things, what about Studio? Is that going to be sticking around?

Raj Singh 00:11:59 Studio will definitely be sticking around for a very long time. First of all, Studio just does things that the VS Code ObjectScript extension doesn't do, and may never do. All the low-code editors for the Interoperability/Ensemble products, just don't exist on Visual Studio Code yet. There are a lot of wizards in Studio that people have grown very used to, which the VS Code platform just works on a different metaphor. So I don't even know if we can bring, we definitely can't bring them in the same form to VS Code. We may be able to replicate them in the model that VS Code likes a little bit, and we'll continue to do that with code templates and things like that, but they're going to be different platforms for the foreseeable future, and they're going to have different strengths and weaknesses. And I think people who have grown accustomed to Studio will continue to use it for certain things. And they'll probably end up in a mixed environment, where I expect over the next couple of years, more and more mainstream ObjectScript development will probably be on VS Code, and Studio will still be there for custom…I don't want to say esoteric, but some more special-purpose needs.

Zack Krowiak 00:13:23 Right. So if you're working with wizards or some of those more kind of,

as you said, obscure needs that Studio offers, that's the way to go, but for your development work and your kind of regular coding, VS Code is going to do everything you need it to do. So one thing I was excitedly watching was the gradual release of the product. I remember getting to around Version 0.9, which seemed to have all the functionality. And then, that was in, I think, early September, before Version 1.0 came out in October. Could you talk a little bit about what changed between those versions?

Raj Singh 00:14:06 Well, the big change was the language server, which I just talked about. That took the product from kind of a toy to being a real production-quality thing. I don't want to denigrate it too much; it wasn't a toy, but the syntax coloring wasn't perfect. There were things that weren't colored right. There was very little inline documentation. Like I said, you don't want to build all the documentation for all the classes available, built-in classes in IRIS, into the extension. So there are a lot of things that were very limited. So getting the language server in there was the biggest change. And then there was so more testing going from 0.9 to 1.0. Throughout the summer, we expanded the user base, and InterSystems getting involved in the project attracted a lot more beta testers to it, gave them the confidence in it that they were willing to devote some time to it. So I would say the second biggest change from 0.9 to 1.0 is hardening the whole thing, having many more eyes on the product and tons of bug fixes and little tweaks and enhancements. And then the third big thing is the introduction of the server manager extension, which lets you…we changed the idea of how you configure your access to service in 0.9. In previous versions, you pretty much had one server that you could access. And if you wanted to access…you only had one server per project you could access. If you wanted to access a different server, start another project. 1.0 allows you to have multiple servers, multiple IRIS servers or Caché servers, hooked up to the same project and also allow you to use server-side source control instead of only client-side source control. So a host of new features, I would group them all under moving into the enterprise-level feature set. And so it definitely works the same. Most of it works exactly the same as 0.9, but much deeper and it'll take you a lot further. You won't max out on your ability to do your projects.

Zack Krowiak 00:16:28 Great. Yeah. There's so many things I've experienced there, but there's

still the things you're describing. I'm still excited to dig deeper in and try some of that out.

Raj Singh 00:16:37 Oh, I forgot the big one big one, which is encrypted password storage.

Prior to 1.0, you couldn't store your password encrypted. You could only use it for development environments. Cause you either had to store that password in plain text for your server, for your database server, or you had to type it in every time you connect it, which is a right pain.

Zack Krowiak 00:16:57 Yeah. That's a big one. Yeah, so what's next for VS Code, ObjectScript? What's the future hold?

Raj Singh 00:17:06 Well, I think this winter is going to be less big splashy features and more making it rock solid. We're going to, I think with 1.0 coming out, that will attract a lot more users to the product. And when you get a lot more people, you'll find some of the dark

corners, some things that don't work as well. So we'll spend a lot of time making it solid and

dependable. And then we're going to begin to look at some small new features and some

big new features. Somebody we're talking to this week during the Virtual Summit, our annual user conference, brought up the issue of code refactoring, which I think is a must-have. It's one of my favorite features of an IDE, which decades ago, when I started being a programmer, got me off at text editors, and to use a real IDE is…the idea that you can change a variable name, that the IDE would allow you to change a variable name, and it would change it everywhere it appeared in your project, or change a class method signature and change it everywhere it appeared in your project…those kinds of mass refactoring things are huge productivity boosts, so we need to get more of that in there. I think we're going to greatly expand the number of code snippets, which is VS Code's term for templating out boilerplate code. So that there's stuff you write all the time. And you don't want to type it in every time from the simplest thing like for loops or if/then statements to whole class signatures. If you're doing a REST implementation, there's a bunch of stuff that is boilerplate that you just need in there all at once. If you're extending a class, there's a bunch of boilerplate stuff. So we'll be taking a close look at what are the most useful things. And once again, jump on GitHub Issues and request your favorite boilerplate code templates. And we will work on building as much of those as we can.

Zack Krowiak 00:19:16 Right. Thank you. So, one last question I'm just wondering about…this is an open-source project. Does that mean that if I see a feature, I can theoretically do a pull request and try and develop myself? Are you encouraging users to do that as well if they have the time and motivation?

Raj Singh 00:19:33 Yeah, definitely. That would be great. That is the ideal state of any open-

source project, to have a huge, thriving developer community. And don't be intimidated. This is another great thing about the VS Code platform over Eclipse. You can get into programming for it very easily. So for example, writing extension is hard. It involves TypeScript programming; and understanding the whole code base can be very complicated, but as I mentioned, the boilerplate code, that is something which is done simply through writing a single JSON file, and you can even do user-specific code templates. So you can create your own little JSON file that works in VS Code without even submitting it to the main open-source project for inclusion in the whole product. And we have a document available in the GitHub Repo called contributing.md that shows you how to set up your Visual Studio Code environment for development instead of just use. But yeah, it's pretty easy to get started and there are steps to get you…dip your toes in the water and get you more and more involved in being a code contributor. And then on the governance side, we've set up a process for accepting those types of contributions, and having you become more and more a part of the project. You can get involved as much or as little as you want to be in the development side of this thing.

Zack Krowiak 00:21:10 Great. So yeah, the future looks like tightening it up in the short term, making sure that we address any support cases as they come, of course, invariably with any new technology, and then a little further down the line, adding some of those features like code refactoring. Raj Singh, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Raj Singh 00:21:32 Yeah, thanks. I can't wait to see what people do with this platform, not just from a user perspective, but this is a product for developers and by developers. And I hope to have a lot of developers join us on making it better.

Derek Robinson 00:21:50 So thanks again to Raj and Zack for having that conversation about VS

Code. The extension is definitely a great breakthrough for making development on InterSystems technologies easier and more intuitive. So we encourage you to check that out if you haven't already. That'll do it for Episode 15, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services.

Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll be giving you a preview of the five different Experience Labs created by Learning Services that you can look forward to at the 2020 Virtual Summit.

Derek Robinson 00:00:40 Welcome to Episode 14 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. In this episode, it'll just be me, no guests on the podcast today. Our whole team here in Online Learning always ramps up during the summer every year, in preparation for the Global Summit. Many of you listening have probably attended Global Summits in the past. Every year it's a chance for InterSystems partners and customers to come together and learn, collaborate, and network, and share their experiences with InterSystems products and anything else in their careers. Of course, given the global pandemic, things are different this year; everything's virtual, and thus it is the 2020 Virtual Summit that's happening this year in October and early November. Links in the podcast description will get you to the important information. But today I want to run through the five different Experience Labs that our team has been working on and will be offering at this year's Virtual Summit.

Derek Robinson 00:01:31 Experience Labs are something that you may have attended at past summits if you have frequented Global Summits in the past for InterSystems. They're designed to be 45-minute hands-on exercises that typically focus on a new and exciting feature within the InterSystems stack of technologies. The five labs that we're offering this year cover the topics of FHIR, IntegratedML, Visual Studio Code and ObjectScript, InterSystems Reports, and HealthShare Provider Directory. So let's start with FHIR. Formally, this one's called Building FHIR Applications with InterSystems API Manager. This lab is meant for healthcare developers. In the exercise, you'll learn how to use InterSystems API Manager to view APIs to write FHIR applications. More specifically, the application that you build in this exercise will query for observations that may predict the severity and progression of COVID-19, retrieving data from a FHIR server over REST. So it's a topical use case for sure. InterSystems IRIS for Health provides a base FHIR server implementation with a FHIR resource repository. And for this exercise, we've pre-configured a FHIR R4 server on an IRIS for Health instance, pre-populating its FHIR resource repository with some sample patient data. And notably, this lab has already been taken by some people, and one person remarked that it's a three-for-one lab, meaning that you get FHIR, IRIS for Health, and API Manager, all in one. So that's pretty cool. The team working on the FHIR lab has consisted of Craig Lee, Patrick Jamieson, Jenny Ames, Adam Coppola, and Duong Do.

Derek Robinson 00:03:02 Next up, we have Hands-On with IntegratedML. If you attend other sessions at Virtual Summit, you're bound to come across IntegratedML as one of the new features being discussed. This lab is designed for developers who have a good grasp of SQL and want to integrate machine learning into their applications. The exercise will guide you through the steps, all of which are simple SQL commands with very familiar syntax, to create, train, and execute a predictive model on a set of patient data to predict patient readmissions. You'll learn a bit about the data preparation that goes on before implementing machine learning as well. But at the core of the exercise, the objective is to remove the barriers to machine learning by integrating it straight into the relational data access in InterSystems IRIS. The exercise is contained within an Apache Zeppelin notebook, so it's super easy to click and run commands, play around with your own, move at your own pace, really explore the lab and IntegratedML as a feature. I personally worked on this lab and designed quite a bit of it, and I'm excited to see others benefit from it. The others on the team who worked with me were Tom Dyar, Benjamin De Boe, and David Lepzelter.

Derek Robinson 00:04:10 Another lab being offered is Developing ObjectScript with Visual Studio Code. Now this one is pretty widely applicable to any developers that use InterSystems technology. In this lab, you'll go step by step through installing Visual Studio Code and managing the source code of an InterSystems IRIS server. For many of you who have used Studio or Atelier in the past, VS Code is really the current evolution of what is recommended. And it's a free platform that developers tend to be familiar with as well. Using the ObjectScript extension, you can become familiar with how to set things up, and be able to manage your code, connect it to a server. And one of the good things about this lab, in my opinion, is that coming out of it, you really have everything set up to connect and work with any InterSystems IRIS instance by simply updating really just a few configuration settings. So once you have Visual Studio Code set up, you're going to come out of this lab good to go and connect to any InterSystems IRIS instance. Raj Singh, Tim Leavitt, Adam Coppola, and Duong Do made up the team building this lab, and it looks great. Like I said, I tried it myself just yesterday.

Derek Robinson 00:05:12 Next we have Getting Started with InterSystems Reports. A little bit of a different focus here, as this one is targeted at data analysts and report designers for the most part. InterSystems Reports is a new tool in the analytics area, and this is another topic you'll likely hear about during Virtual Summit across other presentations. In fact, Episode Seven of this podcast featured Product Manager Carmen Logue, who gave a breakdown of what InterSystems Reports is in anticipation of it coming out. So definitely check out that episode if you're interested to learn more about this technology specifically. In this lab, you'll use both the InterSystems report designer and server to develop a banded report, a bar chart, and a cross- tab report. You'll also learn about how to publish this report to a server. This lab provides a good way to see how seamlessly InterSystems IRIS can connect to this simple reporting solution to make your data more digestible to your audiences. Carmen, of course, as I mentioned, was part of the team building this lab, along with Zack Krowiak and Duong Do.

Derek Robinson 00:06:10 Last, but certainly not least, we have Provider Directory: Sharing Clean Provider Data with FHIR. This lab is meant for data stewards, data architects, or health

insurance executives. In this exercise, you'll walk through Provider Directory from the perspective of a data steward for an insurance company. You'll view a provider record and dive into what source records contribute to that master record. Look at the record's history, see how updates to Provider Directory propagate to the Unified Clinician Registry in HealthShare. And you'll even test out FHIR endpoints exposed by Provider Directory. The team building this lab consists of Jim Derrickson, Zach Krowiak, and Jaising Pasten.

Derek Robinson 00:06:48 So those are the five Experience Labs, and we're really excited for learners to get the chance to do them. These labs will become available after the keynote sessions of Virtual Summit. So follow the links in this episode to register for the summit and get the information you need. The labs will be on demand. You can launch them and take them at any time during the Virtual Summit. And that time frame leads up to the week of November 2^nd to 5^th, when each lab will have two different time slots for office hours: one at noon Eastern time, and one at 10:30 pm Eastern time, to account for our global audiences. The full schedule of office hours is in the description of this podcast. So there's a nice little primer on what you can expect from the Experience Labs at Virtual Summit. We've been working hard to build these, and we're really excited for you all to try them. That'll do it for Episode 14, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

Then, you'll hear from Jaising Pasten about his journey, his experiences since joining the team, and some of the items he's worked on recently. One of them, which he mentions, is a Provider Directory video about navigation and search. HealthShare customers can view it here: https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?name=PDFirstView

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson    00:00:02    Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, we're chatting with Michelle Spisak and Jaising Pasten, two of my colleagues on the Online Learning team, for a look inside Online Learning. 

Derek Robinson   00:00:43    Welcome to Episode 13 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Today's episode is the first in what may be a recurring type of episode every once in a while, called What's New in Online Learning? The idea behind an episode like this one is to take a look behind the scenes of the Online Learning team as we build content and work on projects aimed to better equip learners of our technology. In the first half of the episode, I'll talk to Michelle Spisak, an Instructional Designer on the team, about the monthly learning newsletter. Then I'll chat with fellow course developer Jaising Pasten, about what his experiences have been since joining the Online Learning team after spending several years in the InterSystems Chile office, working on TrackCare, learning, and implementation. So without further ado, here's Michelle.  

Derek Robinson    00:01:26    All right, and welcome to the podcast, Michelle Spisak, Instructional Designer here at InterSystems. Michelle, how's it going?

Michelle Spisak: It's good, Derek, how are you doing?

Derek Robinson: I'm doing great. We're very happy to have you on for a little bit different of an episode today. We're really focusing within Learning Services and talking about some of the things that we have going on. So obviously you have, you know, a lot of different responsibilities in your role here at InterSystems in the Learning Services team as an Instructional Designer, but we're going to focus today on your role with the Learning Services newsletter. So first question kind of just for the audience that may not be familiar with it and may not know what it is, tell us what the Learning Services newsletter is and why we began offering it in the first place.  

Michelle Spisak    00:02:02    Yeah, so the newsletter is just basically a way for our clients and partners to stay up to date with what Learning Services is coming out with. So on the Online team, we're always coming out with new videos and learning paths, and other things like that. Documentation has been working really hard to modernize their website and make it even easier for people to find what they really need, really quickly. And so we just want to make sure that people know about everything that they're doing there. And then finally, in the classroom with all the changes that we've had lately with, you know, quarantine and policy changes at a federal and also local level, we want to make sure that people know exactly what our policies are in terms of the classroom offerings that we have, and also classes that are coming up so that they know, you know, new ways that they can learn. And so once a month, what we try to do is put out this newsletter, just letting everybody know, you know, everything we have going on, because like I said, it's a lot. 

Derek Robinson    00:03:04    Yeah. And I think that serves an important purpose because I think for a lot of developers and end users of our software, they might group together all three of those groups you just said, right? Like Classroom Training, Documentation, Online Learning...a little bit of a look behind the curtain. You know, those are different groups. And so this is an important thing to consolidate information from those sources. So very cool. So the newsletter started about four years ago, and so I know over time that's developed, it's gained some subscribers. We had a few things with like GDPR and you had to change some lists, lots of evolution over the course of time, but what are some of the recent improvements that you've made this year to be able to make it more effective for the recipients of that newsletter?  

Michelle Spisak    00:03:42    Yeah. Like you said, we've been doing a lot lately in terms of kind of slimming it down, streamlining it. We used to include like pretty substantial descriptions of all the different resources so that people had an exact idea of what we were offering, but we found that that's not really necessary for people to know whether or not they want to check out a resource. So what we try to do is make it as easy as possible for people to find, you know, "Oh, this is a video that I'm definitely gonna want to know about. I really need to know more about, you know, FHIR APIs or whatever."  And so we started really streamlining it, first of all, putting, you know, the things that we think will be most popular up front. And then also from time to time, we've kind of brought in another voice, like for example Jim Breen, the director of Learning Services worldwide, has provided an intro, just a little letter, so that he can kind of speak directly to our clients and partners and say like, "Hey, this is, you know, what we're doing. We know everybody's facing a lot of uncertainty right now, but you know, we're trying to keep people informed about Learning Services and always bring new information to everybody about our products and technologies. So that's kind of what we've done so far. In the future, what we'd really like to do is continue to modernize the newsletter, you know, kind of update the look and feel a little bit. So subscribers will definitely start to see a little bit more in terms of fun features, new ways that they can engage with the newsletter. Instead of just, you know, reading it, here's a way that you can interact with it a little bit more. So we're trying a couple different things and it's panned out so far. People seem to really be responding well. So yeah, hopefully that continues. 

Derek Robinson    00:05:32    Nice. Yeah, that's great. And I mean, I think for anybody who's familiar with the learning.intersystems.com website, there's a ton of content on there, right? Like there's lots of past Global Summit presentations and videos and courses and, you know,  we have so much content on there that sometimes it might not be easy to actually identify quickly, like what's new, like what has changed maybe, what some new topic that I might be interested in. So I think newsletter is a great way to distill that for people to understand what they might be missing if they haven't been on the Learning site in a month or something like that, you know.

Michelle Spisak: That's exactly it!  

Derek Robinson  00:06:07 So speaking of that, with this month's newsletter, what are some of the cool things that people might be interested in, some of the other, any ones that particularly jump out at you for content that you included in this one? 

Michelle Spisak    00:06:15    Yeah, so absolutely. I mentioned you know, that we're trying new features to help people kind of get engaged. One of the things that we tried this month is to, and, we'll continue it in the future, is to provide a spot for people to contribute what we're calling their "quick wins." So little ways that they found, little tips and tricks that they found, that are helpful for using InterSystems products and technologies that they want to share. There's always space for this in the Developer Community, you know, to share your little tips and tricks and stuff, but we would love to start including some of those in the newsletter so that readers can get just, you know, alongside all of the updates about, you know, what we're doing lately, here's also something from your peers who are saying, "This is how I've used InterSystems technology to help me in my job." 

Derek Robinson Nice! 

Michelle Spisak    00:07:08    Right. Yeah. So that should be a fun thing that we're starting now.  We'd love to get feedback on that, anybody's stories out there. And then also there's lots of videos this month. New videos about new technology that we think is really gonna help people, like InterSystems Reports. There's a couple of videos on Provider Directory. There's actually one use-case video that's really cool that shows an automated receipt processor, which might not be directly relevant to everybody in their position, but it's cool to see how people are using InterSystems technology in their own jobs. And maybe there are ways that it can spur on, you know, new ideas. 

Derek Robinson    00:07:47    Right. Nice, nice. That's a lot of interesting stuff for people, both, you know, heavy users of our products and also people that maybe are newer and evaluating and just kind of looking at it and exploring it. So I think that's a lot of good content. All right. So last question. How can we subscribe to the newsletter, and also, what can we expect in the future from the newsletter going forward?  

Michelle Spisak    00:08:05    So, first of all, to subscribe to the newsletter, we'll put a link in the show notes so that people can just very easily just click to subscribe. There's also a little link on learning.intersystems.com. If you go there and just click Learning News on the home page, it's just a really quick and easy way to get there. So we try to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up. And then in terms of things that people can expect to see, I touched on this a little bit, we're going to be updating the look and feel again to just kinda modernize things, make it, you know, even more pleasing to look at every month. And then also we're always looking for feedback. So if there are things that people want to see more of or, you know, new features that they think would be cool, we're happy to provide that. In the past we've done kind of a who's who of Learning Services, let people see, you know, who are actually the people who are creating all of the material that they read.  If you want to see something like that or something else that you think would be interesting, we're always looking for feedback, again. So feel free to shoot us a quick email about that. 

Derek Robinson    00:09:10    Yeah, for sure. All feedback and all suggestions are welcome.

Michelle Spisak    Yes, absolutely.

Derek Robinson   So Michelle, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you soon! 

Michelle Spisak    00:09:16    Yeah. Thanks Derek.  

Derek Robinson    00:09:22    Thanks to Michelle for taking the time there. Next we have Jaising. I recap Jaising's journey a bit in the opening question here, but he definitely has an interesting story, and I believe he's actually the first guest we've had on whose first language is not English. So lots of credit to him for being willing to join us. I think he did a great job. Here's my interview with Jaising. 

Derek Robinson    00:09:45    Alright, so welcome to the podcast Jaising Pasten, Online Course Developer here at InterSystems. Jaising, how's it going?

Jaising Pasten Very good! What about you?

Derek Robinson: Pretty good, thanks. And we're happy to have you on, your first time doing a podcast here, probably a little blend of nervousness and excitement, I'm guessing.

Jaising Pasten Yeah. Both of them.

Derek Robinson: For sure. So to give the listeners a little bit of background, Jaising, you joined the team about a year ago, I think, or maybe a little bit less, the Online Learning team here at InterSystems, is that right?

Jaising Pasten: In November.

Derek Robinson:  In November, it'll be one year. So, and you spent the past five years or so in Chile at the InterSystems office in Chile, and you were working on a lot of implementation stuff, being able to create training for the people doing implementations of InterSystems products. And one thing that you started to get into was Learning Services material in a way, but you didn't really have the budget for it in Chile, being kind of a one-man show. So tell us a little bit about what that was like briefly, and then also what it's been like transitioning to the Cambridge office, where you're actually now part of a full Learning Services team with resources and processes at your disposal.

Jaising Pasten:  Yeah, well actually, I think it's a very huge change. I began with InterSystems, sorry, with Learning Services in Chile, with zero budget, but it's just because I tried to resolve a problem with the training in Chile. Nobody are prepared to do the training in Chile, so I talk with my manager at the moment and we discuss about it and he told me that, "yeah, go ahead," but I don't have money for it. So yeah, I receive an offer for, it takes a lot, maybe a year or more, and that's the way I arrived to Boston. And it was a very huge change because as I told you, I never worked with budget. So here, for example, the things that you have now, podcasts, the license, all are considered are like a basic thing. I didn't have it. 

Derek Robinson  00:11:56  Right, right. Nice. So, being able to leverage some of the software tools and, and kind of things that we've built into place, that can make the job a whole heck of a lot easier than doing everything yourself from design to production, to reviewing and releasing, right?

Jaising Pasten    00:12:09    Yeah. Well, that's another big change for me because all the Learning Service Chile was I (laughs).

Derek Robinson  Right, right!

Jaising Pasten 00:12:20  So now we have a very entire process, a powerful. Someone can review your job. I think it's very good. For example, when we have the ID review or text review. People that maybe don't know the product, that the way that we know, see the video or see the script and, and define if it's understandable. And actually for me, it's even better because you know, English is not my first language. I feel they're safe if someone seeing my job and, and define, because it's not the same, it's not the same when you talk or in your mind you think that the course and someone read that, sometimes different.

Derek Robinson    00:13:10    Right. Yeah. That was going to be one of my questions with, you know, you've mentioned before, you've you mentioned even before we started recording to me, you mentioned that English isn't your first language, and that is one of the adjustments you have to make in this move to the U.S. office, the move to a team that is fully really only speaking in English. And so it sounds like you kind of mentioned the text and ID reviews. Those are a couple of things that are, you know, course development lingo for us, but sort of the reviewing of the language and the writing in a video script that you might write, or a course section or an exercise. And it sounds like those are a couple of things that have really helped you as well.  

Jaising Pasten    00:13:49    Yeah, well, I say that not only for me, I mean, I don't speak English. I mean, I speak English, but it's not my first language. But even for the rest of the team, it's a good idea to have this process when someone can see your job because, it's not just, we're a worldwide company. We need that our job, our work be very good and enough. And if we need to review more than one time, it's fine. I think the process, it's a new experience for me, but all this process was syncing in a way that all the, all the parts work together. I cannot work without the Production team or the people who reviewed our script or, and so on. So I think the most important thing about Learning Service is that we work like a team.  

Derek Robinson    00:14:57    And so, so it sounds like a lot of those things have been able to help, you know, take what you were doing before and as a one-man operation really, and be able to implement it and kind of continue to work in the way that you really enjoy working, which is designing learning content and really paving a path for a learner to understand a topic, but having a lot more processes and tools and resources and teammates at your disposal. So that's really cool. 

Jaising Pasten    00:15:23     And, and actually another thing that I think I can help, I have another view because one of the things that most of the people say about the Learning Services, we work just for U.S. And that, I think that has been my value here. I always say that we are a worldwide learning service, so we need to be like a worldwide learning service. So I have been helping people translate some courses, adding closed captions in Spanish. Even I have been like a connector with people in South America with the U.S. because they contact me directly because it's easier. You know, it's not just the way that you talk. People in Latin America know me, so I be a contact for the rest of the Learning team. Actually, I speak both Spanish and Portuguese, so people from Brazil have contacted me to help them.  

Derek Robinson    00:16:35    Right. Yeah. And you're really kind of one of the only people on the team that has those connections to those areas of the world. So I think it's pretty cool to be able to step into that role. Last question here, just kind of shifting a little bit to maybe some stuff that you've been working on recently, just to give a little bit of light into kind of, you know, we, we have a bunch of course developers in our team and I think I'll, some of them have been on this podcast before and others will be joining us in future episodes to talk about what they work on. As I mentioned, I talked with Michelle before about what she's worked on. So what's a recent project that you've been working on and are kind of really interested in and might be able to share a little sneak peek of, of why it's important and what's been exciting about it? 

Jaising Pasten    00:17:15   My first course here was the Starting and Stopping the HealthShare. I need to confess that I didn't have experience in HealthShare because in Chile, I used to work with TrackCare. But I have been receiving a lot of help from you, from my manager, and all the team, to learn new features. And well, now I'm working with HealthShare too. And well, I currently working in Provider Directory, making different videos. Actually, I released the
Provider Directory Navigation and Search, where I show how to move through the Provider Directory. It's a very, overview video, but it's the first step if you don't know or you aren't familiar with the program. So we are going to have the entire first steps for Provider Directory in, I think in one month. 

Derek Robinson    00:18:25    Yeah. Great. That's awesome. So, good to see that after doing a lot of TrakCare, you can dive into new technologies and new products and be able to learn from colleagues. And I think it's one thing InterSystems does a great job of is having people within the company be very willing to lend a helping hand and be able to help people get up to speed on a topic when they really need to. So that's great to hear.  

Jaising Pasten    Yeah. Actually, I like to learn new features, or new software. Actually, I am very interested, interesting in learn about machine learning and artificial intelligence. And I think it's a new thing that is going to be the future for InterSystems too.

Derek Robinson   00:19:08  Definitely. I agree. So Jaising Pasten, thanks so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you soon.

Jaising Pasten  Thank you.

Derek Robinson   00:19:16   So hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode, a little bit of a look behind the curtain at the Online Learning team and what's going on. Make sure to not only subscribe to the podcast, if you haven't already, but to subscribe to the newsletter Michelle talked about earlier. That'll do it for episode 13. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on Data Points. 

To see the chat functionality discussed in this podcast, you can check out https://gettingstarted.intersystems.com or browse https://www.intersystems.com, notably the "Try InterSystems IRIS" page linked at the top.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll talk to a few different team members here at InterSystems about the all-new chat feature that enables users to get their questions answered quickly and easily.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode 12 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Today's episode features parts of conversations with three different people at InterSystems. These three people are Jenny Ames, the team lead of Online Learning content, who you've heard from before; Gary Maggiolino, Senior Manager of Global Marketing Technology; and Joey Moritz, Market Development Event Representative. Jenny, Gary, and Joey all have different roles, and they complement each other in the project that you'll hear us refer to as the chatbot. This chat tool is something similar to what you've probably seen on a bunch of websites, a pop-up assistant to help the user find what they're looking for or answer their question. This episode contains a look behind the scenes of building that functionality to help InterSystems users browsing the Getting Started site, the official InterSystems site, or the Try InterSystems IRIS page. Rather than run the interviews uncut, I'm grouping together their answers on various topics so we can easily hear the similarities and differences in their perspectives.

Derek Robinson 00:1:42 My first question to all three of our guests was about the value that a chatbot like this provides for our customers. You'll hear Jenny, Gary, and then Joey give their thoughts, in that order.

Jenny Ames 00:01:52 Well, the chatbot has been really interesting because it helps us meet the need of really helping our prospects and our customers get help and answers as quickly as possible. So it really is like that first connection point. And then we can use our experts to get people quickly to what they need, and we can also learn from it as well to build on that and help make our sites better.

Gary Maggiolino 00:02:14 You know, first and foremost, from a marketing perspective, it really provides insights into the behaviors on how individuals are using the website. How are they finding information? You know, what are the questions they're asking themselves as they're researching, as they're browsing, as they're trying to find information? Gaining that type of data really helps you shape the experience. You can provide somebody — whenever somebody is engaging with your entire web ecosystem as a whole, you want to be able to provide them the most seamless, the most interactive, but at the same time, an experience that allows them to find what they need quickly and efficiently. So you know, besides that engagement, we want to know how people are using our website, but then you can flip the coin and you can look at it from a user's perspective. What chat really provides is the opportunity to engage with an organization in a very low committal way. You know, you can get answers to questions. You can find information you want, and you control the information about yourself you want to give, and when you want to give it. You're not having to register and log in. Kind of like walking up to somebody at Target and saying, hey, where are the cameras? You know, you get down to the section, you can browse, you can hold the camera, you can look at it. And then you say, if I need to know more, I can ask. And then the more I get in the conversation, I'm going to control how much information I want to tell you, what I want to provide, and what I'm looking for. So it gives that kind of experience. And that's what our goal around a good chatbot is.

Joey Moritz 00:03:59 I think the value of providing our customers with the chatbot is that instant gratification of being able to talk to somebody they know. A lot of times, they have to call, they have to get in touch with the right person. Some personalities may not like talking on the phone as much; they may be used to just typing and talking through email, things like that. So I think that when they're able to just jump on, they don't have to be a VP level or a C level or any of that. Your average developer can jump on. Hey, I'm looking to learn more about this, or my company is doing this. So you get a lot of the developers and the people doing the research actually coming to you, and you get to make that personal connection with them. And I think that personal connection, especially right now, during these times, is kind of key.

Derek Robinson 00:04:55 Considering these value props, I asked Gary for more information about developing requirements for something like this, and any key elements they needed to consider in the planning and design of this tool.

Gary Maggiolino 00:05:05 The type of chat you want to have was…actually for us, too, it was one of the most critical things we had to decide, meaning are we going to build just a live chat where somebody clicks on it, says, how can we help you, and Bob's waiting there to type away? Or is it something that's completely automated and driven by a script and predefined pathways and kind of a choose-your-own-adventure kind of book? Or is it a hybrid approach? And we built the latter. We thought it was important to let people have an unobtrusive kind of beginning to it. You know, here's the path that I want to take. I know what I'm looking for — but then provide the opportunity at multiple touchpoints to say, oh, how can we help you? Would you like to speak to somebody? Would you like to get connected to somebody? Just providing those off-roads is kind of super important to them. So we thought that was the easiest way for individuals to get information, but at the same time, have engagement in the process. You know, you don't ever want to keep somebody waiting, either. So that's kind of something. It's like you text somebody, and you're waiting for an immediate answer, and you're staring at three dots for a minute. And you know, that minute can seem like an hour.

Derek Robinson 00:06:24 Following on to that answer, I mentioned to Gary that you might also need to think about the resources that you'll make available for live chats, with something like this. Gary added a bit more insight about resources, as well as planning how many chatbots you may want for different use cases.

Gary Maggiolino 00:06:38 You know, if you're a company who has multiple products, so you know that you span multiple industries, are you going to build one or two that addresses all products and then all industries, or are you going to specialize? You know, you can build 10, 12, 15 bots in the blink of an eye if you really say, I want to have customized journeys and speak to people in their own language. And of all of those though, one of the most key elements is be conversational. Remember, this is a person; the goal of this is to have someone talk to somebody. So even if it's automated, it should have that tone to it.

Derek Robinson 00:07:12 Gary's final thought here stood out to me. The goal is to talk to a person, but here we are, talking about a chatbot. I asked both Jenny and Joey for their take on the transition between robot and human in tools like this one.

Jenny Ames 00:07:25 Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, we established up front that our main goal is to help people get the answers they need. So whether that's the bot that can answer the question or a person that can answer the question, we want both customers and prospects to be successful. And so whichever one can answer the question better, faster, that's really the ideal. Now that transition between the two is really, really important. So the bot should not be a person. It needs to be clear. It's not going to have a person picture there. It's going to be a generic graphic or something like that. And it needs to be very clear that it is a bot that is not going to be as personable. Now when the human jumps in, they need to be personable and open and transparent. And so one of the things that we've been kind of working through is for the person to, right off the bat, introduce who they are and then ask how they can help before even looking at the conversation. Then they go back and look at the conversation and try to catch up. But yeah, making that distinction between the bot and the person is really, really important, to set expectations for what kind of conversation they're going to be able to have.

Joey Moritz 00:08:40 The transition from the actual to the human is very important. You can see a lot of problems that could occur during that transition with the many different questions that can come up, and just training that bot to ready for any of those to come up. It can just be a mind-numbing task. But I think that where — back to the value is — even if that bot doesn't seamlessly pull us in, we have such a great team already usually watching, that we can notice something going wrong and we can jump in. And I think the customers just getting somebody there willing to help them kind of lessens the need for the seamless transition as much as okay, at least somebody is here to help me, like that's their comfort zone now.

Derek Robinson 00:09:33 So a bit of a common thread that maybe I didn't really expect here was the notion that you may actually not want that transition to be totally seamless and undetectable. Maybe it is better for the user to actually know that they have made the switch from bot to human. Joey echoed this with this short follow-up answer.

Joey Moritz 00:09:49 I almost want them to know they were just talking to a bot and now they're talking to a human who is going to give them human responses. And you know, this is also a good time to bring up like, oh yeah, I know your team that you work with, things like that. So, as much as you would love it to just go bot to human without them noticing, I think there is some appreciation and the fact that, okay, we got the bot to do what we need it to do. Now they have a human and they feel comfortable.

Derek Robinson 00:10:23 I wrapped up the interviews with each guest by asking general questions about the overall process, as well as their key takeaways. Here, you'll hear their answers about the process of working as a cross-functional team to build this thing. And I have to issue a quick apology here. You'll hear a Microsoft Teams message sound during one of Jenny's answers. That's on me. I forgot to mute my alerts. So don't be confused why you actually don't have a Teams message. That's straight in the podcast audio.

Jenny Ames 00:10:46 It's a really interesting project because it unified a lot of different teams at our organization. So we have FRC, which is really the first response center. They are the first people in support that take the initial calls and then route them to different places. And then we also have ; they're more on the sales side, working with prospects and identifying leads. These are two awesome groups, but they don't really have many opportunities to interact and collaborate. So it's been really interesting to see how they've been working together. I think one thing that we've learned through this is setting expectations up front on what this is and how we can help. So to our customers, the chatbot is not really a way of getting support. Really, they should be going through support at intersystems.com, and the regular filing a ticket through the WRC, but the FRC group and the MDR group, they're really good at knowing who to connect people with. So one of the things we've learned is we may not necessarily be able to answer those big technical issues, which might be what somebody might expect the beginning. So we're trying to be better about setting expectations on what the

chatbot is, and how to really help people the best. But I think that's one thing that we're learning and we're trying to get better at. But it's also been a really great tool to unify within the organization, break down those silos, and really learn from each other, both on the support and the sales side.

Joey Moritz 00:12:17 Yeah. Luckily, I don't have to do the actual implementation of it. For me, it's more just viewing what's going correctly and what's going incorrectly. And then I just have to report it back to Gary and Jenny, who have to do the hard work. One thing though that I have found interesting about this project was seeing the different teams work together. As you said, we all come from different backgrounds, and we all have different positions in it. And a lot of times I'm used to working with marketing and sales teams because of my position, where now I'm seeing the FRC, the WRC, and kind of seeing how the support teams work together and everything. And I think that that's very important from an internal aspect because you're kind of getting out of your every day. Well, this is how the company is run. You're like, Oh, this is a whole 'nother world that the company that I had no clue existed.

Gary Maggiolino 00:13:17 We spent a lot of time, after we launched it in the first 30 to 60 days, and really looked at the data behind the conversations: how were people having them…you can do what you call a path analysis and say, oh, more people are following this path. We got to repeat it, we got to do it. But when you got into the nitty gritty of the conversations, I think the biggest thing for me was trust. And, you know, anytime you're engaging with an individual and you've established trust with them — I mean, that's huge. And I look back at the conversations, and you see where we've answered a question pretty quick, or maybe we've even solved a problem. The tone changes so fast. "Is there anything else that can help you with?" "Oh, by the way, I need this, this..." They become very open. They become very free. You can actually see where that wall comes down, that you've established trust and credibility, that you're there, and you're there to help them and support them. You know, that's one of the biggest things. And it's actually become a metric for me to look at, is how are we using this to establish trust with individuals?

Derek Robinson 00:14:32 Lastly, here are the key takeaways each of our guests had about where this project ended up, and what the future might hold.

Jenny Ames 00:14:38 So I think the biggest takeaway is: a chat element on the website is a really great tool. It's really just the beginning of the conversation. And one of the things that we have been trying to evaluate and how successful this is, is those different handoffs. So while the bot or a person, the live chat agent, is really that first connection point, what we really want it to be is a filter into the rest of the materials. And we want to really fine tune. It's going to be an agile process. We're going to continue to improve it over time, figure out what is most useful to people. And then we really want to evaluate based on those handoffs and how those handoffs are really helping people to be successful. So it's a process, and we're learning from it as we go.

Joey Moritz 00:15:30 I think this chatbot is great. I think it's great for our customers, our prospects. I think it really nails home kind of what John Paladino always brings up about our customer support is unrivaled by anyone else. And I think that this goes to show how much further we're willing to go than other people.

Gary Maggiolino 00:15:51 People engaging like this, is going to be a route that's going to allow us to open a lot of inroads with people. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what we can learn in terms of user experience, and how we can help and provide services and support and learning to prospects and customers. I see this growing and growing. Jenny and the others, the other stakeholders of the project, we talk all the time, and we say oh, we could use it for this. Oh, we could use it for this. So we're just beginning to really explore how deep, enriched of an experience we can provide through chat. So I'm really excited to see where it's going to go.

Derek Robinson 00:16:39 So thanks again to all three of our guests for taking the time to chat, no pun intended, of course. Hopefully you liked the different format of this podcast episode that featured spliced-up answers to my questions and kind of framing them in context. It seemed better than airing three interviews that were largely redundant right next to each other. This project turned out great and has been providing users with a path forward to answer their questions. Hopefully you found it useful, either due to your own interest in InterSystems products, or maybe your own interest in building one of these tools for your websites. To check out the bot that this team built, you can see those websites I mentioned in the intro, which are linked in the podcast description. That'll do it for Episode 12. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time on Data Points.

In this episode, Ksenia Samokhvalova — UX designer at InterSystems — joins the podcast to talk about the user experience for InterSystems products and how her team strives to improve that experience through smart design.

Take a quick survey and sign up to be a user experience tester: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NNYWWKT

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services.

Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll chat with Ksenia Samokhvalova, a User Experience Designer here at InterSystems, to talk about the user experience of InterSystems products.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode 11 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. On today's episode, as I mentioned in the intro, I'm joined by Ksenia Samokhvalova. Ksenia is on the UX team here at InterSystems. And the conversation with her is an interesting one for a few reasons. First, it's a bit different than most episodes of Data Points, where we cover a feature area or technology concept and learn about how that feature is used. Here we're talking about the approach to use your experience around those products and technologies.

Derek Robinson 00:01:12 All right. And welcome to the podcast Ksenia. Ksenia, how's it going?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:01:14 Hi, Derek. I'm great. How are you?

Derek Robinson 00:00: Good, good. We're glad to have you on the podcast for a different topic, I think. A lot of times we cover features and the basics of how to use it, or understanding what it is. And I think today is a little bit of a different flavor, so definitely going to be an exciting conversation to have and to share with our learners. So let's jump right in and first, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at InterSystems.

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:01:37 Absolutely. I am a User Experience Designer, and what I do is I

help our development teams develop applications that are easy to use, and that solve our users' problems and pain points. And I also help our developers to learn and understand their users better: learn about the user's workflows, pain points, struggles, goals, that sort of thing.

Derek Robinson 00:02:07 Nice. And so I think that kind of gives a high-level view of what

you're doing. What about your team — is this something that you run yourself? Do you have a team, and if there's a team, what is the approach, and what's your main goal and focus as a team?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:02:21 Yes. So we now have a UX team at InterSystems. We are relatively new here. We've been around for about two years. It's not a big team, but we do cover the suite of InterSystems products, from TrakCare and HealthShare to data platforms. And I am focusing on data platforms right now. We do the work of helping with creating intuitive interfaces and learning about our users.

Derek Robinson 00:02:54 And actually your answer is a good segue into the next question I was going to ask cause you intuitive interfaces. So when we're talking about UX/UI stuff, people often jump straight to the graphical user interface, right? The flashy, the pretty, you know, in my head, it pops in like Google Material Design and things like that. So is that really the main focus of what we're talking about, or is there more to it when it comes to the InterSystems- specific approach to UX?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:03:21 That's a great question. So a lot of people, like you mentioned, think of, when they say UI, they're saying GUI, so we're talking the forms and the screens

and the buttons. People think about making things pretty and making colors nice. But a lot of what we do is also API work. And so we developed APIs for our developer users, and those also need to be intuitive and easy to use. I think it's now becoming clear that you need to make the APIs also streamlined for the users. So it's no longer the case that it's cool and prestigious to know this obscure language that is hard to use, and you need to spend hours and months and years of your life figuring out. Now we have developers who just need to hit the ground running. So we've been working, for example, on making the first experience of IRIS easy to use, and making it easy to just start going with IRIS and start coding. So the usability of API is becoming more and more important, I think. And this is what I've been working on, in addition to working on the graphical user interfaces, is API usability.

Derek Robinson 00:04:51 Yes. I think that's a good way to look at it. And I think, to tie this

in with some of the other things we've covered on this podcast, I know that one topic that I've been involved in InterSystems that I think crosses over into your area when you talk about testing, or really assessing and evaluating the usability of an API, is IntegratedML, right? One of the new features of InterSystems IRIS. Can you talk a little bit about what your team has done in that area as far as like an example of working on the UX of an API versus a user interface?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:05:21 Right. So yes, we have worked on usability testing, IntegratedML

API, and I'm happy to report that we were able to see that indeed that core API, that we were hoping was intuitive — and it was designed to be intuitive — was in fact easy for users to understand. So they were able to, for example, read the code that they've never seen before and understand what the code was doing. And then they were able to use what they have figured out and apply it to a different problem, different data, and be able to use the API. We also found out by talking to them during the sessions that users really wanted to know a little more about what kind of model this cool IntegratedML has come up with. And so we're now

working on exposing more of that information in the interface, and that's something you would

learn from talking to people. It was really cool to observe people use this. And those were people who have never seen it before, but they were our target audience. So people who are SQL developers, but somebody who's not a machine learning expert. But they're curious about machine learning because it's a cool thing now and it can really help them in their work. So they were able to use this interface, and that was really good to see. And I think that was one of the first times we've done this kind of work at InterSystems, which was also really cool. And actually the team also was able to see the value of involving users early versus waiting for the feedback. One of the things that you find out is that if you wait for that feedback to come, sometimes you will never hear about usability issues. So users are not really forthcoming reporting usability issues. First of all, they're not experts on that. So they don't think about it. Secondly, they are reluctant to complain that they couldn't understand something because they tend to blame themselves and think, oh, I should have read that documentation. I should have spent more time on it. And I think it's our job and my job as a UX designer to help them and come up with the interface that is intuitive to use so they don't have to spend the time reading something for hours trying to comprehend it.

Derek Robinson 00:07:59 Yeah, exactly. Right. That's really interesting. And I think in the course of that answer, you sort of touched on another thing that I was going to be asking you is — I'll kind of roll two questions into one here — which is, you know, it sounds like the way by which you get this information is these user tests, right? Like you invite users to test something and walk them through different parts of what you're really assessing and see how they viewed the usability. So combined with, you can talk a little bit about that process, but also talk to the average person at InterSystems, right? You know, a developer or a support engineer or a product manager, they might think that they can just kind of do that testing themselves, right? Like I can look at this product and know whether this is usable or not. So talk a little bit about the process of bringing in users to test, and then also why that's different than people who are embedded around the product all the time, assessing it themselves.

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:08:52 Right, absolutely. So the process that we use to see how usable this interface is…there several different methods that have we have in our toolbox. We can actually just heuristically evaluate the interface and assess it ourselves as user experience

professionals. And this could also be done by somebody who is not a UX person, given the set

of heuristics like do we rely too much on some concepts that are not in the interface, for example. You can assess this, the interface, as an expert, but usability testing specifically is the technique where you invite your target user in for a session and you give them a set of tasks. And I ask them as a facilitator to please try to do these tasks using the interface. And we observed them trying to complete those tasks. And generally we keep quiet. So we let them work, and we ask them to think aloud and tell us what they're thinking. So they might not be necessarily telling us, oh, this is hard to do, or this is hard to use, but by observing them do it, you can infer that this was really painful, even if they're literally saying nothing about it. So you can see that they're struggling by just watching them work, which is really a valuable thing, and something that is hard to do otherwise because we are not being shipped with our product, right? (laughs) So we can't be there and look over somebody's shoulder as they use it for the first time or for the hundredth time and try to understand what they're thinking. So we approximate that by inviting them in early and asking them to do it. So and for your second part of your question about us at InterSystems, as developers, parts of development team, can we do these assessments? So It's a great question. I think specifically for interfaces that are targeted at developers, sometimes people think, well I'm a developer too. Yes, I work here, but I know SQL, and I should be able to assess: how is this to use? So what I like to remind people, and this needs to get internalized, then eventually it does, is that we are not the users, but you can have the skills that the users have maybe. So they know SQL, you know SQL. Maybe you know it at the same level, but your goal as the developer at InterSystems is to develop the software that InterSystems sells, right? But the goal of our users is not that. Their goal is to build their application. In our case, for data platforms, they could have their own users and customers. And so their goal is not to write software. Their goal is to solve their user's problems. And so that distinction and the goal, and then the mindset, is very important, it turns out because we live and breathe our technology here, but our users might not, and that doesn't make them bad users or, you know, they are not incompetent. They're very competent at what they're doing, but their goal is to not use our software day in, day out. Just like you and I don't show up to work every morning and think, oh, I'm going to use some clients today. That will be fun. You know, but we use it and we're proficient at it because we need to get our work done and that application helps us. So it's similar, similar for us and IRIS and our technology. Our users have their own problems to solve, and we need to understand what they are, and they are different from our problems and pain points. So that understanding is really important. And being able to know what the struggles are, or what they're trying to do, is something you really get by talking to them. And it could be used during usability tests, but there's also interviews that we do, where we talk to people about what they're doing, what their use cases are. They can walk us through the workflow. They can show us in the tool what exactly they are doing, which is usually worth a thousand words. We can kind of walk with them through their day-to-day life, using our tools, and that's super valuable.

Derek Robinson 00:13:53 Yeah. That's interesting. I think. And so you drew a lot of good

comparisons about even with the same skill set, two different people have vastly different

approaches and main goals for using the software. And I think you explained a lot about what the process is for getting these users' feedback and everything. Now for the people listening, how can they give their own feedback? How can they get involved in this process, if they are an InterSystems user who has feedback about UX, or would like to participate in these types of research-gathering studies and sessions and things like that, how can they learn more?

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:14:25 Yes. great question. So we are running these sessions all the time now, which is really great. And in the description for this podcast, there's going to be a link to go and fill out a short survey so that we can get in touch with you when we are looking for people to interview and participate in those sessions. And yeah, like I said, there are the usability sessions where we ask you to actually try something we're working on. We say it's usability testing, or user testing, but one thing I can't stress enough, we wouldn't be testing you — your abilities, your knowledge — in any way. We would be testing the design of our software. So any and all feedback would be really valuable. It's nothing to be scared of. There's no grade, you can't fail, and it's fun. And you get to see something that we're working on and talk to us. And a lot of people I think have had fun doing that. We also are doing interviews. So that's another thing that we have going on. So you can sign up, and we'll get in touch with you when we have an appropriate project. Also, if you're a member of our Developer Community, keep an eye out for announcements that we post. We post both in the Developer Community and Global Masters. Sometimes there are challenges, and you can sign up. Usually there's some kind of survey just trying to see, does your skill set match what's we are looking for, but generally speaking, there are lots of opportunities to participate. And I hope you do, because we really do want to hear from you, and nothing replaces talking to actual users. You know, we've been thinking about usability a lot. We can be the most powerful database on the market and be easy and intuitive to use. Those things are not mutually exclusive, so we can do it. And that's why UX team is now at InterSystems, and we're trying to make this happen.

Derek Robinson 00:16:42 Absolutely. So hopefully people will follow that link and give you feedback on that. So Ksenia, thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.

Ksenia Samokhvalova 00:16:47 Thank you so much, Derek! It's been fun.

Derek Robinson 00:16:53 Thanks again to Ksenia for joining us. What's interesting about this discussion to me is how it breaks into a new category of UX in my mind, beyond what we typically think of, which entails graphical interfaces and visual items. InterSystems products don't always have a lot of graphical user interfaces, and it's not really necessarily an end-user consumer product. It's mostly used by developers, building applications for their clients. And so the user experience is much different than what we often think of with user experiences for web design or mobile apps or different end-user products. So I thought it was interesting. And as Ksenia mentioned, you can follow the links in the podcast description to get involved in the UX process yourself and have your voice heard by the UX team. So that'll do it for Episode 11. We'll see you next time on Data Points.

To try out SAM, visit this GitHub repository: https://github.com/intersystems-community/sam

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services.

Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson. And on today's episode, I'll welcome back to the podcast Luca Ravazzolo, Product Manager for Cloud and Containers here at InterSystems, to talk about Systems Alerting and Monitoring in InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode Ten of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Before we get started, I wanted to give a quick reminder to subscribe to the podcast, using the links at datapoints.intersystems.com. You can find links for Apple, Spotify, Google, and Stitcher there. I also wanted to mention that the Developer Community, community.intersystems.com, is the place to interact with us about future topics for the podcast. I typically post every episode as a Developer Community post, and you can feel free to leave comments on those posts. I might also make a discussion post at some point, asking for more ideas to try to give our listeners a chance to submit topics they would like to see covered. So feel free to join the conversation. Back to the episode, I'm joined today by Luca Ravazzolo. You might remember Luca from Episode Two of Data Points, where we covered Kubernetes. Today, Luca is telling us all about Systems Alerting and Monitoring, SAM for short, which is a new component of InterSystems IRIS that you can try out.

Derek Robinson 00:01:39 All right. And welcome back to the podcast Luca Ravazzolo, joining us for the first time since way back on Episode Two, I think it was, of Data Points. Luca, how's it going?

Luca Ravazzolo 00:01:47 It's going very well, Derek, thank you very much. Yeah, it was early days and podcasts from then, right?

Derek Robinson 00:01:53 Yeah, exactly. You were you were one of the first three guests we had in that initial launch, which generated a lot of excitement around it, and I think people are still enjoying the podcast episodes, and we're happy to have you back. So Luca, I know that one of your areas of expertise here at InterSystems is cloud and containers technology. And so what we're going to talk about today is related in some ways, but also a little bit into the system administration area, and that is SAM, or Systems Alerting and Monitoring. So Luca, can you tell us first for the audience, what is SAM? And you know, as we've mentioned offline, it's coming out very soon for InterSystems users.

Luca Ravazzolo 00:02:29 Yes, absolutely. Yeah. We are counting the hours. So, hopefully

everybody can start playing with SAM with the preview that will be launching soon. So System Alerting and Monitoring, or as we call it in a more friendly way, SAM, for short, is just a simplified way of monitoring your InterSystems IRIS clusters. And we wanted to make it very simple. That is really is the main objective. And you know, the reason for that is because we are painfully aware that there are many sites and installation around the world where people don't have time. They don't have resources to either provision and work with a commercial solution or with an open-source solution that you need to cobble together and make sure that it stands up and it works and is fault-tolerant and all that, to monitor systems. So we said, you know, we need to end that era. Everybody needs to be able to monitor their system and not call the WRC, not call support because they have a moment of downtime, because they forgot, if they run out of storage space. People should be really, followed up so they can have alerting and monitoring. And this is what SAM is for. It's very, very simple to set up and run.

Derek Robinson 00:03:53 Nice. So I think we'll get to a little bit of what makes SAM so easy in

comparison to some of those complex setups that people could have for their monitoring and

alerting, but for starting the conversation with some existing InterSystems users, maybe the

people that have been using InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and now IRIS, IRIS for Health, for a long time, how does SAM differ from what was already available and InterSystems IRIS, both as far as functionality and then kind of transitioning into, like you said, maybe the bigger part, which is how easy it is?

Luca Ravazzolo 00:04:22 Yeah. Well, it's very different. And the reason for that is that basically

you're going to have a UI, a web-based user interface that graphically shows you the metrics

and what they're doing. And this doesn't mean that any of the tools that people are already using now, any of the libraries that we have within InterSystems IRIS, are being taken out. No, everything stays exactly the same. We just added this capability, so that if you've got something that you built on those tools, carry on and that's fine. And the main difference is that we have all those metrics inside our inside our engine. And you know, they're very, very powerful. We have all kind of metrics, but the problem is how do I externalize those metrics, and how do I visualize over a time series, you know, stretch of a screen to understand a trend, for example, and that's always been the problem. You have to externalize them, then maybe you point Excel to that, or some other tool, you do some massaging of the data, but all of that takes time and effort, and we want it to be a lot more intuitive and easy. And that's what SAM is. It's very different because it offers you a UI that very easily connects to InterSystems IRIS on the back end.

Derek Robinson 00:05:40 For someone who is using a bunch of third-party tools, or maybe they

have a setup right now that they use for monitoring, for reporting, and the way I kind of think of it is that it's complex enough that the next person would need to be trained pretty heavily to figure out how to use all this stuff they have connected, right? How does SAM make that easier for those people that have these existing setups, and then maybe what are some of the details and the reasons behind why it's simpler?

Luca Ravazzolo 00:06:04 Yes. So we've used SAM, System Alerting and Monitoring, as an appliance. So you just take it the way it's configured, and now , and you just run it. And as you run it, it has a series of components that it puts together and makes sure they are well configured, and basically your job as somebody that wants to monitor a cluster of IRIS instances, either with many nodes or many sharp nodes there, is just to tell SAM where those endpoints on the back end are. All you need is just an IP address and a port and a socket to define where we're going to pick up those metrics, and that's it. Right? So from an external point of view, it's really that simple. You run it up, we do all the configuration of the different components — I'll go into that in a second. And you just tell SAM where your IRIS instances are, that's it. And then start enjoying yourself in terms of looking at what the metrics say, and drilling down into the single instance from a cluster, -level point of view, to see how your instance is doing on the backend, and it's graphical and intuitive. And that's it. Very, very easy. So, going into the details of this appliance that we just run up and it does everything, right? So, first of all, it's based on containers technology. And we leverage some open-source technology that's out there, probably best of breeds in their individual fields. And we offer this as a Docker-Compose definition. So Docker Compose is just a small engine that reads a YAML definition. Within that YAML definition of the components that we have, there is first of all what we call a SAM Manager. So it's an IRIS instance that deals with a lot of complexity and managing and configuration files, for example, and talking to these other components. And then we have Prometheus. Prometheus is a leading cloud-native computing foundation, promoted project, that basically you can find in any cloud and any Kubernetes engine that runs out there to monitor the platform. So we leverage that as well, just because it does a very good job at it, right? So we're leveraging that because it's very good at metrics. And then for the graphical part, for the more graphical part, from the single metrics, we leverage Grafana — again, probably one of the best metric visualizers out there, again, very, very well-known, and . Now, if you are an expert, or if you're already using Prometheus and Grafana and other things, then you can go in, and of course, tune it to your heart's desire and really do exactly what you want. But even without knowing them, you can appreciate all of a sudden, you have a very powerful solution in your hands that allows you to really, graphically see what's happening in your IRIS instances. However, I would like to underline another fact: that if you just read only metrics from an instance, you only have a partial picture of what's happening out there. And that's why the name of the product is System Alerting and Monitoring. So we monitor metrics, we can show you the metrics, but we also show you the alerts that come from the back ends. And why is that? Well, because if I ask you, well, what does that mean that that particular system is running at 85% CPU? Is that a problem, or is that okay? Maybe it's Black Friday, and you are very happy because you're becoming rich because there's a lot of orders coming through your website, right? And so the point here is that if that 85% is not accompanied by any alerting, then it's probably good. You know, you can maybe go and have a look at the global references, and maybe you can also piggyback — and this is another nice thing about SAM, your application monitoring on the SAM infrastructure. So you understand you'll be able to see, oh, these are effective transactions happening on my system. So that is a good CPU peak that I see. If, on the other hand, I see an 85, 90% CPU peak, and I also see, for example, some IO latency on the disk, and also an alert coming through saying that maybe there is some write problems on one of the storage systems that I have. Then I know that something is looping there or something's stuck, and you know, that system needs attention ASAP. And so by combining alerts, strings, and metrics, we're able to offer you a picture, still a partial picture, but it's a more comprehensive picture of what's happening, for you to understand and maybe act on it. And I think that adds a lot of value. And as I said, you can also piggyback on the same infrastructure, your application-specific metrics that you might want to count.

Derek Robinson 00:11:24 Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot going on there. And I think, one of the things that jumped out to me earlier in that answer was, and I think I might've seen this in some other materials on that one way you could describe it is that it is native, but it's open. And it's a really good that, like you said, may be expert in these other technologies that are connected or may not be, and just really need a simpler way to access the performance of their system and the essential things that they need to see about how their applications and their systems are performing. It sounds like a really, really useful tool for them.

Luca Ravazzolo 00:12:00 Yeah, right. And like underlining what you just said in terms of the open and the native nature of the SAM solution. So it's native in the sense that it's InterSystems native solution. You take that appliance, you run it, and you're off monitoring your systems, but it's open in terms of the open source technology that we're leveraging. So for example, if a user, even if he's not an expert says, yeah, okay, I appreciate the default template that you've given me, InterSystems, for some of these metrics, but I would like to see display of these other two metrics, for example. And I would like it to be displayed with a different type of charts, right? Well then, you don't even have to call us; you can go on the internet and Google Grafana, chart, xyz that you like, how do I set it up — and just do it yourself, it's just all there! So there's so much support, so much availability. Grafana's just come out two days ago with a new version, version seven, I believe. There's really, the community is really working hard. And I think that there are really fantastic tools, and by leveraging them, we offer the best of both worlds.

Derek Robinson 00:13:06 Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. So moving to one more question

before we kind of get to the last part about how people can try this out, what types of roles, as

far as the people that are interacting with these systems at a typical organization, potentially, what types of roles is SAM going to be most beneficial for and provide the most new advantages for, and what are some of the examples in how those people will benefit from using the SAM product?

Luca Ravazzolo 00:13:31 Yeah. Good question. Yeah. Thank you. So originally the idea was that,

when you monitor a system, you have this image of this black room, we call it the NOC rooms, where you have these massive screens up on the wall, and you've got a few rows of chairs and this expert that keeps looking at these big screens, right? And that's the NOC room operator, right? And those rooms, you can't even walk in sometimes; they're really like, they're very segregated. Only this particular user can go in there because you can also drill down into data, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one type of user, and those users usually have very sophisticated products, usually commercial products. And this brings me to another underlying factor of the , that every InterSystems IRIS instance from 2019.4 actually has an inherent, a built-in Prometheus exporter. What does that mean? It means that you can just point your tool — it might be a commercial tool, an open-source tool, a cloud-monitoring tool. Most of them support the Prometheus format because it's very simple, and they can monitor IRIS systems. And this is very, very important. And also consider that you don't have to go and find the exporter, download it, install it, configure it; it's built into each IRIS instance. So this is very powerful. So for the NOC room operators, they can use what they have, or they can install SAM and tune it to their liking because there's Prometheus and Grafana in there. But having said all that, remember that in the new world of DevOps, where there is accelerated development pressure and springs…with agile methodology as well, the CI/CD provision in pipelines. You know, everybody wants to know how it works. So if I'm a DevOps manager and I have a couple of teams, right, that are running with building a couple of microservices or a couple of new add-ons to an old monolithic solution, I want to make sure that from the moment they check in code to the moment that gets built and start in a quality assurance, testing phase, to a pre-production to UAT, all the way to production, I want to be able to monitor every single environment. Now, with one single installation of SAM, I can define multiple clusters, and so I can view multiple cluster instances and how they are doing. So this is very powerful, too. And to underline again the type of user that can leverage SAM, well, within the SAM solution, the appliance will also have an alert manager. And so, we can have system administrators being paged, or messages and alerts can be sent to Slack channels, et cetera, et cetera. And so, you know, all kinds of users can benefit from an installation of SAM.

Derek Robinson 00:16:36 Nice. So that's a good overview of kind of those key areas and where they can draw the most value from this product. So I think a lot of people listening might fall into one of those boats that you just described. So how can people try it out and learn more

about SAM, which as we mentioned is, by the time you're listening to this, may already be available to try?

Luca Ravazzolo 00:16:53 Yes. So, I think that by the time you wrap this up and clean my English here, (laughs) everybody should be able to pull this. So we have the SAM Manager, which is built on IRIS, will be a container available from Docker Hub. So it will be, with a community edition, built-in license. And then with that, you will need also a few configuration files. So there's a Docker Compose, a YAML definition, a few configuration files, of Prometheus, Grafana, alert manager, et cetera, and Nginx. And those you'll be able to find them at github.com/intersystems-community/sam. So there you can just download these few files. We'll be providing also a small tarball. And with that, just run the Docker up. Everything will be described in there, what you have to do, and all the containers will be pulled automatically from Docker Hub anyway. So you don't have to worry about anything. It should be all automated.

Derek Robinson 00:17:51 Nice. Well, that seems like a very easy way forward and a great way for people to try it. And we'll make sure we include the links to those resources in the podcast

episode description as well, to make it easier for everyone listening to go try it out and get in

touch if you'd like to explore more. So Luca Ravazzolo, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Luca Ravazzolo Thank you, Derek. It has been a pleasure. Take care now.

Derek Robinson 00:18:14 Thanks again to Luca for the insight about SAM. As we mentioned, SAM is being released right around the time of this podcast episode, so if there aren't any links yet in the podcast description, keep checking back for those. As soon as it's released and you can try it out for yourself, we'll be sure to update the links in the podcast description. That'll do it for Episode Ten, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

After the interview, we're also welcoming Jenny Ames back to the podcast to tell us about the upcoming FHIR Dev Days! Check out https://gettingstartedhealth.intersystems.com and https://www.devdays.com/us/event-info/ for more details.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast. App. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson.

Adam Coppola 00:00:16 And I'm Adam Coppola.

Derek Robinson 00:00:18 And today we feature part two of our interview with Russ Leftwich, Senior Clinical Advisor for Interoperability here at InterSystems.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode Nine of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. We're going to go straight into part two of our interview with Russ Leftwich. This half of the interview features just Adam and Russ. To listen to the first half of the interview, you can check out the most recent episode before this one, Episode Eight. After part two of the interview, we'll come back and chat with Adam about some of the key takeaways as well as welcome Jenny Ames back to the podcast to discuss the upcoming FHIR Dev Days. Without further ado, part two with Russ Leftwich.

Adam Coppola 00:01:14 So as of 2020, InterSystems products support FHIR®. So that's InterSystems IRIS for Health™, which is meant to be a platform for app development, and HealthShare®, which is meant to be an interoperability engine for healthcare facilities. Can you talk to us a little bit about what some of the applications using FHIR might look like?

Russ Leftwich 00:01:35 So one of the principle advantages of FHIR is that you can access just small data sets, small pieces of data, because most of the time in healthcare, that's all you really need for the care of a patient or for that matter, that's all a patient needs at any one time is just what medicines are being prescribed right now. What are the lab results, the cholesterol levels for the past year? You don't want to know everything about a patient very often. You just want to know some particular piece of data, and that's what FHIR is particularly useful for, because of this idea of resources that are logical, but discreet data concepts. So a medication or a patient or a lab observation, those you can express in FHIR, and you can query for just those pieces of data with FHIR. That makes the possibility of having applications, and particularly mobile portable applications, a whole new paradigm with FHIR that wasn't possible, previously — wasn't possible 10 years ago, because you can just create an application around the small set of data that is of interest in a particular use case, either to a clinician, to a patient, or to somebody doing research even. Our technology in InterSystems goes a large step further by including the ability to transform data that's in existing legacy standards into FHIR resources. So we can take in data from a healthcare system, data that is in HL7® Version 2 message streams, which I mentioned earlier, that is the most used healthcare data standard in the world, still is the way most data is represented, in CDA documents, clinical document architecture, which is another HL7 standard. Data that's expressed in those clinical CDA documents can be consumed by InterSystems technology and transformed into FHIR resources. All those FHIR resources can be stored together in a repository of FHIR resources that is a part of our technology, and then can be queried by REST queries, to get just the data that an application needs for a particular purpose. That's really a very powerful quantum leap, I would say, in what we can do with healthcare data. InterSystems technology is also capable of dealing with all four of the current released published versions of FHIR. So we can go from legacy standards to FHIR. We can go back to the legacy standards because some systems can still only consume data in those formats. And we can deal with the different versions of FHIR that are currently implemented outside of InterSystems in the rest of the world.

Adam Coppola 00:05:26 So we've gotten a little bit into the technical details of how FHIR is implemented in InterSystems products and beyond. I want to take a quick step back and ask the question of: how will these changing standards impact patients and clinicians and administrators?

Russ Leftwich 00:05:46 So they have already started to impact clinicians, and to some extent, administrators, because it's fairly easy to create a FHIR application that works within your organization and lets you visualize the data that you already have. One of the big challenges for healthcare organizations is that it's not easy with the standard electronic health records of today to access the data that's in those systems, other than for a human to view it on a screen that shows an electronic version of a patient chart — paper chart — from the past. When you want to get to the data, only specific pieces of data, the FHIR applications that have been created allow clinicians to do that very readily, and provide a much more useful view of the data in a particular clinician specialist's workflow than the electronic health record would provide. Customizing an electronic health record for a particular specialty over the past couple of decades has been prohibitively expensive. So people had to sort of live with what they had, and it wasn't ideal for clinical workflows, especially as those workloads got more complicated and the data got more complicated. FHIR has already started to solve that problem. The same for patients, and we're just on the very leading edge of this, that patients are able to access their data in an electronic records system using a mobile app, and the government has recently produced new regulations that say that healthcare organizations absolutely must permit patients to access their own data with those kinds of applications. And the ideal technology to do that is FHIR. And the government has actually said in their regulations that were published just within the past two months that FHIR APIs are the required mechanism for patients to access their data, or to authorize an app to access their data on a clinician or some other entity's behalf. About two years ago, Apple Health Kit created the ability for patients to download a limited set of data to their iPhone as FHIR resources, with not really their entire record, as some of the articles that were published suggested; it was actually just a small but important part of their data, and it could only be downloaded to their iPhone where iOS apps could then access it. But that was the beginning. There are now hundreds of hospitals in the U.S. that offer that capability to patients with iPhones. But as I say, this is just the leading edge of it. Over the next two to three years, I think it will be commonplace for people that have apps on their mobile devices that access their own data, or share it with someone that they have authorized to consume their data, which might be another clinician, might be some analytics platform; it might be a researcher who's researching some condition that this patient has.

Adam Coppola 00:09:46 You've given us a lot to be excited about moving forward. Is there anything else that you want to add to what you've said?

Russ Leftwich 00:09:53 Yeah, let me mention one other way that FHIR is already being used and leverages that ability that I mentioned to just pick out particular pieces of data that are of interest. One of the already useful innovations with FHIR is around clinical decision support. Clinical decision support is increasingly important as the amount of data and the complexity of data increases, and the human mind just can't process all of that data in many instances on its own. Decision support is not new; it's existed for decades. Even before computers, there was decision support in the form of charts and manuals that doctors carried in their pockets to look things up. And then when electronic health records evolved, decision support became part of those electronic health record systems. But the problem was, the decision support was embedded in each implementation of each electronic health record. If some new information, some new guideline came along, it took a long time to update the decision support in all of those different systems. And to some extent, they were each customized for the organization they were in. Now, we come to the day, the era of FHIR, and decision support services can be web services outside the electronic record. So many different electronic records might use one decision support service that is specialized for a particular area of clinical care. And that decision support service can get the data about a particular patient that is needed. We call that the patient context. How old is this patient? What is their laboratory value for something, what is their gender, and so forth? What are their diagnoses? The decision support service needs to know some set of data about this individual to offer a recommendation. Now we have FHIR as a way to export that patient context data out of the electronic record in a consistent format using, as I've mentioned, a data model that all of the systems share, so that one decision support service is getting its context data from many different electronic health records in the same exact format, being FHIR. And then it can pass back a recommendation once again using FHIR as a standardized way to encode that recommendation, if you will, back to the electronic health record system where the patient's record exists.

Adam Coppola 00:13:11 I think this circles back to our earlier conversation about the range of standards in healthcare, because we started talking about terminology bindings, where you're coding specific pieces of data for descriptions. We've talked about FHIR, which is a data standard for resources. And now we're talking about CDS hooks, which is an entirely different type of standard. It's a support standard; it provides data, but it also consumes data while it's working.

Russ Leftwich 00:13:41 So yeah, CDS hooks is a part of the FHIR architecture that has evolved over the last three or four years. And CDS hooks is the part of the decision support that sits in the electronic record system and identifies events that are triggers for a decision support service, and knows what data is needed by that decision support service. So it collects that data from the EHR and passes it to the decision support service outside that EHR as FHIR data. So CDS hooks is the part of the of the decision support that sits in the EHR and runs in the background, if you will, looking for events that would trigger some particular piece of decisions for a medication order, and there is a concern about that particular medication being given to patients who have decreased kidney function. So the CDS hook checks to see if this individual has decreased kidney function, and invokes the decision support if they do. That's sort of the basic concept of CDS hooks, as a consistent way to link out to outside decision support using FHIR.

Adam Coppola 00:15:15. OK. It's been great to talk to you, and we will talk to you soon again.

Russ Leftwich 00:15:21 Yeah. Great. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about data standards. If I stop people on the street and say, I want to talk about data standards, they look at me kind of weird. (laughs)

Derek Robinson 00:15:37 All right. So thanks again to Russ and Adam for doing part two of that interview, which had a lot of interesting stuff. Adam, what were some of your key takeaways from part two specifically, but really the whole thing, if you have any major insights, takeaways, things that you found really interesting?

Adam Coppola 00:15:50 Thanks, Derek. Yeah. I think Russ did a great job of summarizing the new ONC and CMS final rules on interoperability. I think those are going to be pretty big moving forward. My understanding is that we won't see too many new requirements for providers or payers apart from the information-blocking aspects and the new APIs that are required to be exposed. A lot of these rules have been designed so that contracts don't have to be renegotiated, and users don't have to worry too much about their data getting into new hands, except for the third-party apps, which they, the end users themselves, have to authorize. So InterSystems IRIS actually will be able to support providers, payers, and these third-party apps at all levels with user and role-based security and InterSystems IRIS, and support for all these different APIs.

Derek Robinson 00:16:40 Very cool. And I think it was good to see after part one where, which was a lot of conceptual, a lot of the history, a lot of the evolution of the technology, to fold into part two, which kind of talked about InterSystems technology specifically. And I think another thing for me that jumped out in part two was the connection of what the impact is on clinicians and doctors and medical staff, right? Because like I had mentioned in part one of the interview that I have I have friends and colleagues that I went to school with that are in that field, and they don't know anything about the standards and all the technology that is underneath some of these front end systems. So it was interesting to hear Russ's perspective on that and kind of flushing out, you know, what's really involved, and where the impact kind of ripples through to the actual users and the end users of these applications and medical facilities.

Adam Coppola 00:17:28 I agree. I think we're going to see some really creative uses for this in the future.

Derek Robinson 00:17:33 Cool. So we're also joined by Jenny Ames, who is the Manager of the Online Learning Content for Data Platforms. Jenny, you might remember, was on Episode One. Jenny, how's it going?

Jenny Ames 00:17:42 Yeah. Hi, Derek! It's going well. How are you?

Derek Robinson Good. So we wanted to bring Jenny in as well for the topic that Russ and Adam interviewed about in part two specifically, but really the whole thing. And I know Jenny, you could offer your thoughts on the interview with Russ, but we also have some other topics that we're going to bring you in as the expert to discuss, with some interesting things that are coming up for InterSystems.

Jenny Ames 00:18:05 Yeah. well, first of all, Russ is fantastic. He knows his stuff and it's so great to have him be able to be on this podcast, and share some of the things that he says, you know, are going on now, and foresees in the future. So Russ is great to work with. One of the other things that we've worked with Russ on lately is kind of preparing for FHIR Dev Days, that's coming up. And that's coming up June 15^th to the 18^th, and we're pulling together a bunch of resources to be able to support this, but it's actually remote this year, which is really exciting, 'cause I think there might be some opportunities for other people who might be new to FHIR or experts in FHIR. It really spans the board on people being able to be there. So I'm really excited about this event coming up.

Derek Robinson 00:18:51 Yeah. So with a lot of events that were probably previously planned to be in-person onsite events, another challenge, obviously to create a virtual event, but what are some of the you know, A, it might remove some barriers for some people that maybe wouldn't have gone to an onsite event or, or traveled or whatnot. What are some of the reasons that people should look into attending this event if they can, to really get the benefits of FHIR Dev Days?

Jenny Ames 00:19:16 Yeah. so there's lots of really great benefits. First of all, there's experts from a ton of different organizations that are coming to speak, people that have built applications on FHIR. They start from basic to some really cool applications of how they're using FHIR to really impact their facilities. We actually have someone from InterSystems who's going to be speaking, Patrick Jamieson, who's the Product Manager for InterSystems IRIS for Health. And he's doing a presentation on API management with FHIR, which is a really interesting topic. So that's on Thursday at 2:45, but I've seen him do some presentations in the past on this topic in particular, and I think it's going to be a good one.

Adam Coppola 00:19:56 Jenny, can attendees of Dev Days expect anything from Learning Services?

Jenny Ames 00:20:00 Yes, actually. So, well, we've partnered with a few different other groups, so it's not just Learning Services, but we've put together a page specifically for those interested in FHIR and InterSystems technology to get started. That is on our new Getting Started Health site. It basically shows a bunch of resources, exercises, use case videos, and ways to get started with using FHIR with, specifically, InterSystems IRIS for Health. But yeah, I'm excited for how it's coming together, and I'm hoping that it will help people who are new to our technology, and also for people who are just interested in using FHIR with our products that haven't done so before.

Derek Robinson 00:20:38 Nice. And we'll, we'll make sure we put the URL to that in the podcast description so you guys can check that out, which as Jenny said is eventually probably going to just be a generic kind of place for information on FHIR within InterSystems IRIS for Health. So good stuff. Thanks for the update, Jenny. And thank you, Adam, for interviewing Russ. So that's all we have for Episode Nine, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

To check out the new series of InterSystems IRIS Tech Talks mentioned in the introduction, head over to https://www.intersystems.com/intersystems-iris-tech-talks.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:02 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson.

Adam Coppola 00:00:16 And I'm Adam Coppola. And today we'll chat with Russ Leftwich, Senior Clinical Advisor for Healthcare Interoperability at InterSystems, about modern healthcare interoperability.

Derek Robinson 00:00:38 Welcome to Episode Eight of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services, and much like last episode, I'm joined by a fellow co-host at Online Learning. Adam, how's it going?

Adam Coppola 00:00:47 It's going well. Thanks for having me, Derek.

Derek Robinson 00:00:  Cool. So today on Episode Eight, we're going to be interviewing Russ Leftwich, who I'll have Adam introduce in just a moment, but first a little bit of housekeeping at the beginning here. First of all, we hope you guys have been enjoying these episodes. And like we mentioned, we're doing these remotely right now. So bear with us, as we're trying to do the best we can with our audio and our setup here. Technically, everyone is remote, not in our office, so hopefully everybody's staying safe and sane and everything else, and making sure that we're getting through this together. One quick shout-out for something that is being done by the Marketing group at InterSystems that is coming up soon are these InterSystems IRIS Tech Talks. So I put the link to those Tech Talks in the description of this podcast; you can hop over and check that out. The reason I suggested is because the first Tech Talk is featuring three of our prior podcast guests, Tom Dyar, Carmen Logue, and Benjamin De Boe. So, they're covering machine learning, AI analytics, some good topics there, and these Tech Talks will be continuing throughout the spring. So go check those out. Definitely some good content that you can gather from some of our best experts here at InterSystems on those topics. So check out the Tech Talks, and now moving into Episode Eight where we're featuring Russ, Adam, give us a little bit of an introduction of who Russ is and why he's such an exciting podcast guest for our listeners to be excited about.

Adam Coppola 00:02:02 Sure thing. We're really lucky to have him. Russ practiced internal medicine for 25 years before retiring to start a second career in clinical informatics. Russ has been at InterSystems for five years as a Senior Clinical Advisor for Interoperability. He's the standards guy here. He has been involved with standards development at Health Level Seven International, otherwise known as HL7, and a number of other organizations that work on developing interoperability in healthcare.

Derek Robinson 00:02:27 Nice. So obviously qualified. And I think as you'll hear in our interview with him, I think that comes through quite clearly that he's very qualified to talk about this stuff. He really has a breadth of knowledge on all these topics. And so as a result, we really had so much in our interview with him that we are breaking it into two parts. So Part 1 of this interview is in this episode, in Episode Eight, and what can people expect in Part 1, and then what is going to be broken into Part 2 in a future episode?

Adam Coppola 00:02:53 So in Part 1, we'll go over some of the history of healthcare interoperability standards. We'll discuss some of the major innovations, as well as how the demand for new standards has driven some of the technological advancements. In Part 2, we'll really focus on one of the new standards, which is FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, and we'll go into a little bit more about how InterSystems supports FHIR and other standards.

Derek Robinson 00:03:20 There you go. So exciting stuff. So without further ado, let's kick off Part 1 with Russ Leftwich.

Adam Coppola 00:03:28 OK. Russ Leftwich, thank you so much for joining us this morning on

Data Points podcast. Can you please tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at InterSystems?

Russ Leftwich 00:03:37 So, five years ago I came to InterSystems as a Senior Clinical Advisor for Interoperability. I'm the standards guy; I've been involved in the work that goes on and the standards development organization, Health Level Seven, HL7, as well as a number of other organizations that work on developing interoperability in healthcare.

Derek Robinson 00:04:04 Nice. Talking about innovations in healthcare, tell us a little bit about some of the innovations that you've seen over the years in healthcare and especially in electronic record keeping and how that has evolved.

Russ Leftwich 00:04:15 Well, most people don't usually think of healthcare data standards as innovations, but in a very big sense they are, and it started 40 years ago or a little more when hospitals started to have electronic systems, more than one system, in the hospital. But at that point, the use case was really just about connecting those systems. And that was a big challenge because it took engineers working for weeks just to connect two systems. And as hospitals started to get more systems, a registration system, a laboratory system, scheduling, in radiology, and a pharmacy system and so forth, they had to connect all the systems together. And that led to the formation of the standards organization I mentioned, Health Level Seven, which is a healthcare data standards organization, and they were formed because there was a need for a way to address that use case of connecting systems within a hospital. It was not at all about sharing data across organizations or with the government. It was just about connecting the systems in your hospital. So those first data standards, one of the very first ones was HL7 Version 2, which people use just HL7 at the shorthand for that data standard. It's still in use. It's the most used data standard in healthcare, but it doesn't meet interoperability needs that have evolved over the past 40 years, you know. And until 20 years ago, most of the data in healthcare was still in hospitals. Now in the past twenty years, we've seen this explosion of sources of data that are outside the hospital, everything from genomic sequencing labs to the Internet of Things, to wearable devices, mobile devices. So there's an entirely new use case for healthcare data standards.

Adam Coppola 00:06:38 So Russ, can you tell us a little about what all these standards cover? You've talked about sharing data within institutions and across institutions, but what kind of data are we talking about?

Russ Leftwich 00:06:50 So we're talking about a lot of data, and the types of data continues to expand. In the 1980s, it was mostly about administrative data, not even what we would really call healthcare data. It was a patient's identity and demographics: where the patient was located in the hospital, what they were admitted for. And then starting to add to that their diagnosis, the reason they were in the hospital. Laboratory data was one of the first forms of electronic data in healthcare. But then we started to add other data and started to electronically document the care of patients, where the data included the history of the patient that was written down in a narrative. The problems diagnoses that the patient has, that had to be encoded in a way that machines could understand. And doctors and other clinicians in different hospitals, different places would know they were talking about the same thing. And then there were data that's electronic data like electrocardiograms, monitoring data that is physiologic data in a sense, and comes in a stream of electronic data. But you need a standard to capture that data and exchange it between the device that captures it and the electronic records system that needs to store it and record it, so the nature of data has continued to expand. The types of data have continued to expand. Now we've got genomic sequencing data that is something completely new in the past decade or so. So we have to continue to create new standards. Early on, the standards were fairly simple, but they were in a sense complex to implement. And in the beginning, it took experienced engineers weeks just to hook up two systems within a hospital. And when they changed the software version of one of those systems, they had to do it over again. That was increasingly time-consuming as hospitals started to have more systems. A few years ago, somebody observed that the average hospital in the U.S. has over 80 IT systems within its walls. So interoperability sort of starts at home. You've got to connect those systems first. As you start to share data more broadly across organizations and across countries, you need increasingly sophisticated, let's say standards, because everybody has to agree on the same concept of the data that's being exchanged. We call that agreement a data model. In the beginning, there was no real data model except what was worked out between two teams of engineers working with different systems. Now we've reached the point that we have to create fairly elaborate, fully specified data models to describe not only the values of the measurements in the data, but the context of that data as well. And we do that with terminology bindings, value-set bindings. So a standard specification for a data model includes the terminology, which is an entirely separate, if you will, set of standards, that communicates what we mean when we say systolic blood pressure, for example.

Adam Coppola 00:11:01 So now we're talking about two different levels of data standards. The first is the data model or data structure, which allows machines or devices to reliably communicate with each other. The second is the terminology or context, which allows an end-user or machine to interpret the contents of data. For example, if an observation is made about a patient's blood pressure, a context code is paired with the data to say what type of blood pressure it is, or how the measurement was taken.

Russ Leftwich 00:11:30 So those data models have become a requirement if you will, for Interoperability, as the use case has matured to this idea of sharing data across organizations and data that actually sits in many different systems, and bringing that data together.

Derek Robinson 00:11:56 Right. Yeah, it's really a complex problem. And I think a great explanation of all the different pieces involved in solving that. I think personally, you know, I have friends and colleagues that work in the medical space as doctors and nurses, and I've kind of laughed at times when I've tried to have some of these discussions with them, and they oftentimes don't even know anything about these messaging standards that go on underneath it. And so it kind of speaks to the challenge of all these different systems and all these different, more and more modern applications and systems coming into the scene that you need to really be able to work between them. You kind of talked about having sophisticated standards and being able to really encompass a lot of different things. And I want to transition that into one of the most popular, probably the leading standard that we talk about today, which is being discussed everywhere, is FHIR, right? One of the most sophisticated standards that we have. Can you introduce FHIR to our learners and kind of at a high level, explain what makes it such a powerful model to use, when we're talking about solving this problem of healthcare interoperability?

Russ Leftwich 00:12:52 So FHIR, which is an acronym for Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, and that's resources, as in a URL resource, in a computer sense, FHIR was first proposed about 10 years ago, and it was proposed as a solution to what was increasingly being recognized as the interoperability need of the 21st century. This idea that we've just talked about, that data is in a lot of places and a lot of forms, and you need to bring it together. And FHIR was based on the way we do that in other businesses on the internet. FHIR is in its essence a Restful API. It's a basic data model for healthcare data that you can use to build more complex models or particular use cases. And FHIR was meant to be a way to leverage the internet and web technology in healthcare. We had gone over the past 20 years or so from a time when all the data was in servers, in the basement of the hospital, offline, to where much of the data is online, even in the cloud. And as I've said, in many different places. So we needed a standard that could connect all that data and could be implemented as a data model. And that's what FHIR is. The other necessity of that interoperability is that two different systems, or rather all the systems that are sharing data, need to be using the same data model. The challenge is that you could, for many concepts in healthcare, you could create more than one data model that seems reasonable to a human, but if two different teams or organizations create two different data models for the same thing, there is no interoperability. So part of the idea of FHIR is that it's a technology that makes it easy to share those data models…in a machine-readable sense, share the data models and implement them.

Adam Coppola 00:15:33 So thanks again, Russ, for joining us. In light of standards like FHIR that make interoperability easy for a lot of developers, we sometimes take for granted how this stuff hasn't always been easy, and how far we've come as an industry.

Derek Robinson 00:15:47 Yeah, absolutely. And I think hearing Russ go over some of the history of the healthcare and operability technology that exists and kind of how that's evolved over time, it's definitely interesting for a layman, certainly like someone who isn't involved in the nuts and bolts of the actual technical interoperability of healthcare, even for clinicians and doctors and nurses that don't get exposed to that underlying technology. I think just hearing someone with as much knowledge as Russ talk about that is quite exciting and quite interesting and thought provoking, I think, into how all of that works and how it's all evolved.

Adam Coppola 00:16:18 Yep. Definitely. Each one of these systems require specialized knowledge, not just of general standards, but also how the standards are implemented in new situations, how the standards are changing with every update, and all the layers of standards, like Russ said, from terminologies to the data structures.

Derek Robinson 00:16:35 Yeah. So it's a lot to unpack. And of course in Part 2 of this interview with Russ, we will be going over a lot more InterSystems-specific discussion on how InterSystems technology stack works with all this healthcare interoperability that we brought up and discussed in Part 1. So keep an eye out for that, and it should be coming soon. So that's it for Episode Eight. Thank you guys for joining us, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. Links can be found at datapoints.intersystems.com. I'm Derek Robinson.

Zack Krowiak 00:00:15  And I'm Zack Krowiak, and today we'll chat with Carmen Logue, Product Manager for Data Management and Analytics, about the newly released InterSystems Reports.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39  Welcome to Episode Seven of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services, and for the first time I'm joined by fellow co-host, Zack Krowiak, fellow Online Course Developer in the Online Learning team. Zack, how's it going?

Zack Krowiak 00:00:50 I'm doing great, Derek. How are you doing today?

Derek Robinson 00:00:52 I'm doing well. Obviously we're all still adjusting, with the whole global crisis that's going on, global health crisis, with this virus. Everyone's at home, working remotely. We're still trying to keep the podcast going. Last episode we had Jamie Kantor joining remotely, and this time, not only are we going to have a remote guest, but we have a remote co-host. So how are you finding this whole situation, as you're adjusting to the remote life?

Zack Krowiak 00:01:14 Yeah. Well, it's been a change, but I'm pretty used to working remotely with our team. We have a few people who are full-time remote even before all this happened, but I miss seeing everyone's face. And how about you?

Derek Robinson 00:01:24  Yeah, that's really the big thing. I think I've mentioned before in a previous episode that our team is really well adapted to this. I think I might've mentioned before, it would almost be an ironic joke if the Online Learning team couldn't work remotely. I think that's kind of what I've been thinking to myself, but I think that missing that face-to-face interaction is certainly the biggest part of it, where you don't get to collaborate and kind of work over someone's shoulder, if you need to, or even just see people and just have that different feeling. Video chat of course helps, but it's just a difference not being face to face. So we're all adjusting, and hopefully if everyone continues to stay socially distanced and be responsible about it, this can end sooner than later, hopefully. So hopefully all of our listeners are doing well and staying safe. Moving to today's episode, Zack, tell us a little bit about who we're going to be interviewing today.

Zack Krowiak 00:02:09 Yeah. Carmen Logue is a Product Manager in Data Management, and I've worked with her a few times on creating video content for the InterSystems Reports product that we're releasing now. And I'm really excited to get a chance to talk with her a little more and share that all with our listeners.

Derek Robinson 00:02:24 Yeah. And so a new feature that's coming out, InterSystems Reports, and Carmen will be able to tell us all about that. And you know, you obviously have some interesting insight, having worked with her on some of this content that will be available as learning content. So, without further ado, let's kick it off into our interview with Carmen Logue.

Zack Krowiak 00:02:43 All right, Carmen, thank you so much for coming. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Carmen Logue 00:02:47 Oh, I'm doing great. Thanks. It's great to be here.

Zack Krowiak 00:02:50  I'm glad to hear it. And how are you adjusting to living remotely these days?

Carmen Logue 00:02:54  Wow. That's a big adjustment. Isn't it? We've got a, we had to divide up our house in four segments so everybody could have a place to work. How about you?

Zack Krowiak 00:03:  Yeah. Well my own monitor just came in. Before that, my wife and I had been fighting for one computer monitor and sharing a desk and a breakfast table. (laughs)

Carmen Logue 00:03:13 Amazing what we can get done, huh?

Derek Robinson 00:03:15 Making the most of it for sure. So Carmen, thanks again for joining us. And we're going to talk about InterSystems Reports today. So, really cool new topic that people might be interested in. So we'll get started with kind of the high-level overview of this topic, which is what is InterSystems Reports and why should people listen and care?

Carmen Logue 00:03:32 Yeah. Thanks so much for the question. InterSystems Reports is a new feature that we're rolling out here shortly. And actually, initially it's going to be really available to our developers and deployment partners and SE's to get their hands dirty a little bit and start trying stuff out, using it. And it's the ability really for our customers to create pixel- perfect reporting, banded reports, and other elements that they can include with their IRIS solution. So I'm pretty excited about it. There's two components to it. The first one is called Designer, which is really a report development environment, and it allows you to design and kind of prepare your reports there, and then publish those to the server. And then the server, which is a report delivery mechanism, really. So it allows you to do things like distribute lots of reports at a time and email, PDF, HTML, lots of formats. So it gives our customers a lot of flexibility in terms of how they deliver all that super important information that's coming out of IRIS. And I think the reason that it's important right now is that it's really a customer-driven thing. We've known for a while that customers have had this need, and they've been able to solve it in a variety of ways. Sometimes by acquiring another application to use, other times, you know, they've used some of our existing products to make that work, but I think this will really kind of take them forward in terms of giving those additional capabilities and making it just easier to distribute reports to their customers.

Zack Krowiak 00:05:13 Great. Could you tell us actually a little bit about those existing current analytics capabilities that InterSystems provides and how InterSystems Reports will fit into that?

Carmen Logue 00:05:23  Sure. Yeah. Happy to. So, InterSystems, well, we now call it as part of IRIS, it's InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence, or BI. This is something that those of you who have used it on Caché know as DeepSee, and that's our business intelligence capability. So with that, we do dashboards, and really digging into understanding the data, and a lot of interesting real-time information that you can dig into. And I think this reports capability will really complement that in a way, because it's really looking at kind of historical, more static data that needs to be distributed out. It also gives us the ability to provide things as forms, bills, even. We may have some customers that do their W2's this way. So you can really define things in a way that's what they call pixel-perfect, which means, you know, completely configured and designed and then distributed. So I think it'll fit well with our business intelligence capabilities. We also, you know, over the last year or so, have been rolling out integrations with things like Microsoft Power BI and other tools like that because we know that our customers are all very different from each other, have lots of different needs. And the whole area of business intelligence has just exploded. And our customers have people on their staff who are experts in certain tools. And so we want to make sure that InterSystems IRIS supports those as well. So there are a lot of options out there, but you know, it's largely because we have a variety of customers who want to support what they know best.

Derek Robinson 00:06:59 That was a really good explanation of the tangible kind of way that this is implemented in a lot of customers' situations. And I'm sure that some people listening who employ those implementations, there's bells ringing in their head based on what you're saying. To take that and twist it a little bit for the person that might not have that implementation already, what are some real-world use cases, not so much from the integrations in technologies you're talking about, but the actual use case for why developing a more robust reporting solution would provide value to someone's business? Like what are a few business use cases that you can think of?

Carmen Logue 00:07:31 Oh sure. Yeah. So we've got a few of them, I think, that come to mind right away. The other thing that I think people might find of interest is that our TrakCare solutions, InterSystems TrakCare, has actually been using this capability embedded in TrakCare for a couple of years. And so they need to provide all kinds of reporting data within their solutions. I mean, right now with our current situation, they need to provide reporting on incoming tests, and positive/negative, to everybody from states and local governments to country governments as well. So being able to kind of create those reports and make them very easily distributable and schedulable, has been really important. We also have customers who I know are doing some billing or invoicing with our data as well. And so this gives them a way to do that as well. There's a feature called bursting, which allows you to take the same data and distribute a whole bunch of reports at once to different customers with different data. So you could email out things like a bill or an invoice on a monthly basis, for example. And it just makes that whole process much easier.

Zack Krowiak 00:08:42 Great. It sounds like a really enables customers to streamline that connection between the data they're working with and the users that are getting the value out of it. Now I just had a question. You mentioned TrakCare and InterSystems IRIS. Could you tell me a little bit about which InterSystems products will be able to support InterSystems Reports?

Carmen Logue 00:09:02 Yeah, we're rolling out InterSystems Reports initially for InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health. TrakCare will continue to use the capability as well. It's embedded into their product, but we're going to make this available in InterSystems IRIS and IRIS for Health. And I think, you know, we'll look to adding other InterSystems products as time goes on, and as we get a little more experienced with embedding this into our solution.

Zack Krowiak 00:09:29 Great. Now, Carmen, can I ask you, what are you most excited about with regards to InterSystems Reports?

Carmen Logue 00:09:35 I think the thing that I'm most excited about is that I know our customers and our partners are super creative, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what they're going to be able to do with this, because there's tremendous flexibility here. You can create reports that have embedded charts, all kinds of graphical elements, as well as the core data that is what they're interested in. And so I am really optimistic that a lot of our customers are going to find this an easier way to just distribute the information that they need to get out, and really put some more of the power in kind of those end users. So they've got report developers, but also giving some of the end business users real access to the data that they use every day.

Derek Robinson 00:10:23 Nice. So kind of transitioning to a slightly different topic. InterSystems has a great reputation when it comes to support, right? And I expect it will be no different with this product, but what are the plans for how this will be supported, and what customers can expect to get in the area of support, if they start using InterSystems Reports?

Carmen Logue 00:10:41 Yeah. Good question. So, our WRC is going to be our source for support here. This is a product that is powered by Logi Analytics, but we are going to be that frontline for support and we will manage all of that through our WRC.

Zack Krowiak 00:11:01 Great. I have to say, I'm wondering who can use InterSystems Reports and when? If I want to try InterSystems Reports, how do I get a copy?

Carmen Logue 00:11:08 Yeah. Shortly it'll be available for ordering through our standard ordering systems. And I should mention, this is important: We are asking people to sign off, or check the box, if they would like to use it, but this is included in your InterSystems IRIS licensing fee, so there's no additional charge for InterSystems Reports, but you do need to order it. So this would be for any existing InterSystems IRIS customers, as well as any new IRIS or IRIS for Health customers. So you can go in, add that to your order, and we will enable, you know, make the software and licensing available for you.

Zack Krowiak 00:11:48 Great. Well, that sounds really exciting. Carmen Logue, thank you so much for joining us today.

Carmen Logue Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Zack Krowiak 00:12:  So thanks again to Carmen for joining us today. You know, Derek, one of the things that I found really interesting about that is that in this point of time where there's so much information that we're able to process with the InterSystems IRIS product, we're now able to make it so accessible, not only to the users of the data platform, but to the ultimate end users, be those care providers or logistics, support, representatives. It's really great to see this addition.

Derek Robinson 00:12:26 Yeah. And I think, one of the things that Carmen mentioned that kind of jumped out at me was that we've kind of known for a while that this is valuable, right? But I think there's always been ways to do it, right? There's always ways you can…whether it's getting another tool, or building your own tool, or kind of using the existing dashboard and analytics functionality that was there. But really this way to bring it all together and make it so much more accessible and easier. And I think what you bring up is a great point about widening that audience. I think making more users have the easy accessibility to a suite of tools like this, I think is really effective. So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see, I think, how people use that and how they leverage that technology to be able to build those reports.

Zack Krowiak 00:13:10 Absolutely. I completely agree.

Derek Robinson 00:13:13 So that'll do it for Episode Seven of Data Points. Thank you so much again to Carmen for joining us. Look out for Episode Eight, when we're going to be discussing healthcare interoperability with Russ Leftwich and another one of our fellow course developers as a co-host, so you guys can look forward to that. We'll see you guys next time on Data Points.

To learn more about getting certified, you can reach out to certification@intersystems.com.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that Subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode, I'll chat with Jamie Kantor, Certification Manager here at InterSystems, about the InterSystems Certification program.

Derek Robinson 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode Six of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. First and foremost, before we get started, we want to wish everyone well and good health as they deal with the impact of the global health crisis we're currently in. It's an unprecedented time for us, and it's difficult, but hopefully everyone can continue to practice social distancing and do their best to work remotely as much as possible to hopefully slow the spread of COVID-19 here in the U.S. and all across the world. So as a result of this pandemic, you might've guessed that we'll be doing a lot more remote interviews on Data Points for now. For the first several episodes, we had guests in person in the studio at our Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters. For the foreseeable future, though, our guests will be joining the pod through the wonders of video conferencing technology, which our teams here at InterSystems have been using a lot more lately and really have helped us to be able to stay remote and stay efficient and working, for our clients and partners who need us more than ever at these times of global health crises. So today the guest that will be joining me remotely is Jamie Kantor. Jamie manages the Certification program here at InterSystems, which is a fairly new program that is likely to be particularly of interest to developers, customers, and partners that use InterSystems stack of technologies.

Derek Robinson 00:01:52 All right. And welcome to the podcast Jamie Kantor, Certification Manager here at InterSystems. Jamie, how's it going?

Jamie Kantor Hey, Derek, it's going pretty good.  

Derek Robinson Cool. So, working remotely, this is the first podcast that we're doing on Data Points so far that I ever had remote guests joining me. Obviously with the global situation, that's something that's called for at this point. Jamie does work with me in the Cambridge office, but how are you doing adjusting to the remote life?

Jamie Kantor 00:02:16 Hey, it's pretty good. You know, a lot of the workers at InterSystems, we work from home pretty regularly, so it just means just more days at home, but I'm noticing that the company is kind of coming together and making sure we're all okay. So I think it's working fine right now.

Derek Robinson 00:02:30  Yeah, I think I've felt grateful. I know, being at a company like InterSystems so far, that's focused on helping our clients, but also making sure that, the team is safe and everybody's able to do their jobs effectively. And of course, for my team in Online Learning and kind of you, to an extent as well, it'd be, it almost be paradoxical if we couldn't work remotely being the Online Learning team, right? So I think it's been an adjustment, but I think everybody on the team is handling it well and hopefully continuing to get good content to our listeners and our other learners out there. So, I think it's going well. So jumping into the conversation, we're talking about Certification today. You are the manager of the Certification group, and InterSystems has created this Certification program that we're going to talk about. Before we get into kind of the specific InterSystems side of it and what the InterSystems Certification program and exams are all about, let's talk a little bit about the concept of getting certified and why that does exist in the industry, and why so many leading software companies have these programs and exams to get people certified on these major technologies. Tell me a little bit about the background of that and why it's important in specifically the software industry to have those certification programs in place.

Jamie Kantor 00:03:34 Right. So, I guess what I would say is that from a certification point of view, in what we do, our main focus is to ensure quality in a bunch of different ways. So, if you take a look at some of the other big software providers, you'll notice that they have had these programs for quite some time. What they're trying to do at InterSystems as well is make sure that the people that are carrying their technology to their customers, representing them, actually are engaged and have the technical skills that they need. So that's like sort of a quality control thing from a big picture. That's one aspect. The other aspect is, it is really important for software industries, rather, companies, to make sure that their partners or integrators are keeping up with their software as it evolves. So that is another sort of, let's say, control mechanism to make sure that the people who are out there in the marketplace representing you are actually representing the current versions of what your software can do. So those are kind of different dimensions on how, let's say, quality control through Certification, helps large software companies.

Derek Robinson 00:04:45 Yeah, yeah, for sure. And it makes sense like putting that quality control into place, and then also the element of time, like you referenced there, where technologies can be very long lasting, and they can evolve over time. So kind of getting to make sure you're capturing what has evolved in that technology and having ways to measure competencies and, you know, being up to speed with that technology. So that's good. We can, let's shift that conversation into InterSystems a little bit here, 'cause that's obviously what you're managing and driving. So for a while, InterSystems didn't have any Certification program, right? InterSystems has been around for a long time. Its technology has been around for a long time, but the Certification program is relatively new. So what kind of led to that program starting, and what are some of the biggest reasons that we have that program in place now?

Jamie Kantor 00:05:27 Well, actually, you know, we have had smaller programs, but we weren't approaching it, InterSystems as a company, in terms of sort of a comprehensive industry-standard global program. So we had different smaller programs and, you know, people are recognized in different ways, you know. In our community, we also have programs of recognition in Global Masters and things like that. But I think anyone who knows our business, InterSystems business recently, would say that we are just recently having another evolution stage; our business is changing. So there's a lot more partners and a lot more markets that we're engaging. And so what I think is executive management knew that this was the time where we had to build the program to embrace those newer marketplaces and the partners that are in them. So that's why I think the time is now, and what I'd like to think is as we move forward, the certifications, and the exams that we offer, are going to follow the way our data platform evolves, our healthcare products, evolve as well. So again, to get back to why now, there also have been, I will tell you guys, some large deals out there, very critical to, let's say industries in the marketplace and to InterSystems. And in one case, we knew that we could not, not have a Certification program. We had to make sure that anyone who was going in for a specific bid had those skills already. So it was a combination of all that. And that's why I think we are where we are now.

Derek Robinson 00:07:03 Cool. Yeah. And it makes sense from the standpoint of a company adopting a set of technology like InterSystems stack of technologies, right? It has to be a concern going forward that you have a way of making sure that the people using that platform and developing the applications that are running your business, right? That you can measure and be able to keep up with the fact that they are able to use that platform to its full effectiveness. I think that's kind of the spirit of that. So talking about the Certification program, what exams do we have currently being offered, for developers and other users of InterSystems technology to go take and be able to get certified?

Jamie Kantor 00:07:37 Well, we currently have two in production, so that means anyone who believes that they are a good candidate can take them right now. We do have on our website a Certification area in Learning Services that explains everything you need to know: how the program works, and especially what are the exams and what is the profile to which they are oriented. So in the HealthShare arena, we have Health Connect HL7 Interface Specialist; that covers the design, building, and basic troubleshooting of, let's say one of our core competencies, which is HL7 transactions. So that's had some really great uptake. It's also the first one we did. Then, we also have InterSystems IRIS Core Developer Specialist. Now it's funny, there's a little bit of a word salad in all this, and it does make sense, but the specialist is our entry-level certification, and we're trying to orient it at, let's say, an industry professional who has been using our technology for, let's say six months to a year. We will get higher and more difficult with experts and masters later on. So again, what we're trying to do is cover, let's say, our community out there, what they're doing, like the most useful certifications would be, the ones upon which people are working: HL7 and also developing with IRIS. Now what's in the pipeline is pretty exciting to me and my team. What we're working on next is a rather large certification. I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute -- for system administration for IRIS. Okay. So this is going to be able to certify that people can take that data platform and do the care and feeding that's necessary to make it functional. So that is in development right now. It's pretty far along. We're also working on, another one that is, what we're calling, I'd like to say integration for business, but it's going to take IRIS's integration capabilities and using non-healthcare use cases. And also a special, let's say ability as well, some of the programmatic cool things you can do with our platform.  So those two are in development. Back to the HealthShare side of the house, obviously with Unified Care Record, we're pretty far along with our Technical Specialist, and that's for the technical leads in Unified Care Record implementations. And that's quite a large scope of everything you have to do from understanding, let's say, the design document for a specific implementation through custom coding, SDA, and implementation. So these are quite large scope in terms of the certification. We are also getting our feet wet with TrakCaree, which is kind of cool — and, you know, we're going to extend this through our network of implementation staff globally — but what's really cool there is, we're going to be focusing on patient safety issues. So we're going to be really keen to release certifications on the aspects of TrakCare that can most affect patient safety. But you'll hear more in the future.

Derek Robinson 00:10:46 Nice, nice. Yeah. So it sounds like a lot in the pipeline there being worked on. And I think a one point I want to come back to and just kind of emphasize, not so much of a question, but more of a relating it to some of the other stuff we've talked about on this podcast and past episodes is we, InterSystems is very often dropped into the bucket of healthcare IT, and we have a big footprint in the healthcare space, but a lot of that underlying technology really is used in business and other use cases as well. So I think it's interesting hearing you explain the plan for a Certification exam that is kind of akin to the healthcare stack of technology, but applying it to a business use case and maybe adding some additional things that would be relevant to people using those use cases. So I think it's a good way to reinforce that there are a lot of different paths that can come from the same underlying stack of technology. So pretty cool, and excited to see how that comes along. So a good breakdown of the exams and what's coming. Let's shift to a little bit of the persona of people that would be interested in this, right? So a lot of our listeners who have been following the podcast and also ones that haven't seen it yet, and maybe this is the first time they're listening to an episode, they may be developers that have built applications on InterSystems technologies many times, potentially people who have been using these products for quite a long time, and they feel expert, right? They might feel that they've been using this, they know it like the back of their hand since, you know, for decades, potentially. From that individual standpoint for their career, for instance, what's the value add for someone like that to go ahead and become certified on that area that they feel maybe today, perfectly expert in?

Jamie Kantor 00:12:16 Oh, of course. I see your point. You know, we have been considering that, you know, specifically, because InterSystems technology has been around for decades, and it has evolved for decades. You have people already who are expert master level in what we do. So it would be reasonable for those people to say, so wait a minute, what is in it for me for this Certification program? I know I can do what I do. I mean, there's a couple of ways to break that down. Well, let me give you an example on how we went at the IRIS Core Developer Certification. The team that did that, we had a lot of conversations, talked to stakeholders inside and outside of the company. And one thing that we knew we needed to do during the design phase is ask ourselves, how is IRIS used today? To trace back what you're talking about from all of those different kinds of use cases, if you know, previously Caché and now InterSystems IRIS, you know how the evolution has been. You'll know that we are…one thing our company does great is because we're great at interoperability is we adapt to other technologies in the marketplace. So if you took a look right now at InterSystems Core Developer exam, what you'll see is it's a vision of how developers with today's technology use InterSystems IRIS. And that's pretty powerful because again, those of you who are listening, who may have been using our technology for decades, you'll know that we've evolved new ways of doing things more efficient and that work with today's technology like REST and JSON, and by the way, you'll see from the exam design, they're included. So again, remember from the first question I mentioned, excuse me, my first answer, I was telling you about software companies need to make sure that the partners and the developers who are represented in the marketplace are showing them today's version of the product and are competent on those current skills. So that's really reason I can totally understand that someone who has been using our development technologies for decades would think, well, there is not much in it for me, but it's a way for them to show the marketplace I'm up to date. And I think that's pretty powerful.

Derek Robinson 00:14:23 Yeah, exactly. I think that's a great answer and a great approach to why that's important. And I think it leads into the next question I was about to ask, actually. And I think it's a very related answer, which is from not just that. We just talked about the developer, who themselves have been developing on this for a long time and feel expert. What about the customers and partners, not from the individual level, but from the enterprise level, potentially, why would they be interested in knowing about this? And I think we alluded to it before, and that knowing that the people that will be working on your technology stacks are proficient and up to date and with the latest standards of it. But just maybe speak a little more to that kind of tying it back into that individual's interest in it, what these customers and partners, why this matters to them to know about this Certification program and the different exams that people can be certified on.

Jamie Kantor 00:15:10 Yep. Of course. Let me frame this. I think a lot of our current customers know that we have support analysts ready to help them, not only with a high level of motivation, but also an incredibly detailed technical knowledge about our products. So in-house InterSystems, we have multiple learning paths for them, multiple ways to make sure that their skills are exactly where they need to be. So inside the company, that's, I wouldn't say easy, but it's pretty grounded. Again, because we want to work with partners, we want to work with system integrators, how do we ensure that they have hopefully the same level of technical expertise as our people, that they can represent us? And again, here comes Certification. So from a customer or a partner perspective, first of all, to know that the individuals that they're working with, either that, who has been assigned to a customer or who is currently working for a partner, when they walk in the door, they have, maybe they're not experts, but they have a level of competency that will make them useful from day one. So that is what we're trying to do. Now. There's also another aspect for partners here because it is true. As this certification grows and, you know, we offer these electronic credentials and people were very excited to see people actually listing them on LinkedIn and saying, Hey, I'm proud to be an HL7 Interface Developer for InterSystems. So now for the partner aspect, because we also have what we call organizational certification. Organizations can claim organizational-level competency by retaining enough staff. So here comes opportunity for the partner. So now, and we have actually had partners gain business. We've had partners tell the marketplace that they're excited to be certified as an organization. So there's an additional aspect for partners there, and that's just opportunity for business.

Derek Robinson 00:17:08 Right, yeah. That makes sense. That's I think shedding good light on that because it can go beyond just having that confidence in an individual, right? Like there's more ripple effects to that. So very cool. So last question, kind of for if someone's been listening and now they're intrigued by this, what can people do to learn more about the certification programs available?

Jamie Kantor 00:17:26 Well, I'd like to say just like our support reps, we do have a Certification team. It's not big, but of enthusiastic and excited individuals. I'm happy to be one of them. So literally we are waiting with bated breath to interact with all of you. I know it sounds a little strange, but we have certification@intersystems.com. We get some really great questions for us. Like, hey, I just heard about your technology. I want to get certified. How do I do it? And so, you know, we're pointing them to the free resources, the classroom courses. So we're there ready to help people. I will give myself a little small plug in what we do here because we do something that the industry doesn't do. We also offer exam retake support, which I'd like to tell you a little bit about. That simply means that if you're not successful that say your first attempt, you will get a coaching report and see, you know, where your strengths and weaknesses are. But my team's here to also, upon request, walk you through that and orient you towards what you have to do to be successful. So how do you get information? Two places: Go to intersystems.com look up the Certification program. Or number two, ask us questions at certification@intersystems.com. We'd really like to talk to you.

Derek Robinson 00:18:37 Great. So there you go. There's a few easy calls to action, and a can reach out to Jamie's team and be able to get more information. So, Jamie Kantor, thank you so much for joining us. I think it was really informative, and we'll talk to you soon.

Jamie Kantor  All right. Thank you.

Derek Robinson 00:18:52 Thanks again to Jamie for joining us and giving us the details about the Certification program and the value that it can provide. If you're interested in learning more, absolutely feel free to send a note to certification@intersystems.com, and Jamie or his team will be happy to talk with you more. That'll do it for Episode Six. And once again, I want to wish everyone listening good mental and physical health during this pandemic. It won't be easy, but we'll get through it together. See you next time on Data Points!

To try out the First Look exercise on data resiliency and mirroring, visit https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/DocBook.UI.Page.cls?KEY=AFL_dataresil.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that Subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode, I'll chat with Bob Binstock, a Technical Writer here at InterSystems, about mirroring databases for high availability in InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson. 00:00:39 Welcome to Episode Five of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. As always, we hope you're enjoying the first month or so of Data Points. The home page for the podcast is now datapoints.intersystems.com, so you have an easy landing page to go subscribe and to see all of the latest episodes. Today I'm chatting with Bob Binstock about high availability and mirroring databases. Bob has a pretty wide purview of expertise, being a Technical Writer here at InterSystems. And one of the areas he's worked quite a bit on is mirroring. In our discussion, we'll talk about some of the reasons that applications today really require ultra-high availability, and then how mirroring and InterSystems IRIS and other products help to address that issue.

Derek Robinson 00:01:22 Welcome to the podcast Bob Binstock, one of the Technical Writers here at InterSystems. Bob, how's it going?

Bob Binstock Good. How are you?

Derek Robinson 00:01:30 Good, thanks. So today we're going to be talking about mirroring and high availability, which is an important topic for people that have applications running on InterSystems products, or really any products I think, in the world today, and with the way that software development goes and application development goes. So, before getting into the specifics of that technology and those features, let's talk about the concept of high availability in the first place. What is high availability, and why is it important for application development and for really any applications running today?

Bob Binstock 00:01:57 Well, what you just said is actually very accurate because more and more, everybody needs their applications to be online 24-7, 365. We used to talk about mission- critical applications that couldn't afford any downtime. But the fact is that organizations in healthcare, government, financial services, manufacturing, all sorts of areas, live on the network now. So essentially everything they do is mission critical. I mean, it may not seem so critical to me that I can buy something on Amazon right now, but it is to them. Their business is in trouble if they have interruptions. So high availability basically means zero downtime, or as little as you can manage. And that's what InterSystems IRIS mirroring is for.

Derek Robinson 00:02:49 Right, right. So, yeah, the Amazon one's a great example because it matters to their business, and the way it is today, a lot of customers…it's amazing how you'd get mad as a customer now because you expect it to be so available and ready all the time.

Bob Binstock 00:03:04 Sure. And think about healthcare. Nobody wants healthcare to go back to the days when people were looking through stacks of binders to find information about a patient or about a medication. But if you think about it, healthcare happens around the clock, and clinicians and others need to be entering, sharing, and analyzing data around the clock. So as healthcare, more and more goes online, it has to be up all the time. And that's what high availability is about.

Derek Robinson 00:03:34 Yeah, exactly. So, taking that into, kind of how that is put into practice in the InterSystems stack of technology, particularly InterSystems IRIS and other products we'll get to, what is mirroring, starting with IRIS? And then you can kind of expand that to the other products that it's related to.

Bob Binstock 00:03:48 Sure. Mirroring is based on the failover pair, which is a common approach in which a synchronized partner, or standby system, takes over if the primary system fails or becomes unavailable. For example, there might be a network outage. The problem with most failover-based technologies is that they involve a single point of failure—both failover nodes using the same storage, or the system relies on physical copying from one storage device to another, which makes you vulnerable to a storage failure or possibly data corruption getting introduced while the copies made. So mirroring instead uses logical data replication, not physical. All of the needed information is passed over the network. So the synchronized backup copy of a database can be kept on a separate storage device or even in a separate data center. This eliminates that single point of failure as well as the possibility of data corruption.

Bob Binstock 00:04:45 So mirroring is based on journaling, which is one of the things that InterSystems IRIS uses to recover from crashes. So every update to a database is saved in its journal files. If your instance goes down or you have any kind of problem, the first thing you will do is restore the most recent backup of that database, but you still have to take care of the updates that happen after that backup was made. Well, what InterSystems IRIS does after the backup is read the journal files and apply every update made since the backup was taken to the databases, which means you're back to the state they were in when the crash happened. Except of course that open transactions are rolled back, 'cause there's no way to close them. Now mirroring synchronizes the databases on the backup, failover member, with those on the primary, by continually sending the updates that are in those journal files, from the primary to the backup, where they're applied to the database copies just as they would be after a crash. So basically you insert a row on the production database. That insert gets passed to the backup, and the same thing is done there, very, very quickly. The primary and the backup communicate synchronously, with the backup acknowledging each set of general updates that it receives. So the mirror always knows if the backup is caught up—that is, it's fully synchronized with the primary. So if there's an outage of the primary—when that is the case, when the databases are synchronized, which they typically will be—the mirror automatically fails over, redirects applications to the back application—connections to the backup—with zero data loss. And it usually is so quick that users don't even notice. The backup is now the primary, and when the former primary comes back online, it automatically becomes the backup. This can also be triggered deliberately when you need to bring the primary down for maintenance or upgrades. When you're done, you just trigger a failover back to the original primary. So sometimes one or more databases may not be quite caught up. So in those cases, the backup usually can retrieve journal information from the primary's host. You know, it knows what journal information it's missing. The mirror knows the backup didn't have that latest update. And you can usually get that information from the primary's host. That might extend failover to just a few seconds, not long enough to cause any problem. If databases aren't synchronized and the whole primary's host goes down, you might have to get into manual procedures, but the point is, you can always quickly get back to where you were.

Derek Robinson 00:07:28 Right. Yeah. So you talked about, basically the mirror that is your backup kind of knowing whether it's up to date with the primary. So let's say I want to go back to one of the points you made about the journal file, kind of being able to fill in the gaps between those, if it's not up to date. So let's say my primary goes down, and my backup knows that it is not up to date because it basically is not quite there to what the primary was at. Is the journal file accessible, despite the fact that the primary went down? Where do we get that journal file to make sure we can access it?

Bob Binstock 00:08:01 That's what I was saying...it's a difference between when the InterSystems IRIS instance is not in operation, or when the host is down, or let's say unavailable. The journal files are just files on the host file system, so each mirror member has what's called a mirror agent called the ISC agent, which does things like retrieving journal information from the primary host. So if the host is available, you can get that stuff. If it's not, you might have to make a decision between waiting until you can restore the host—the primary host to get that information—or going ahead with failover anyway, knowing that you've lost a little bit of data, but you'll know exactly what that is. You will be able to get that information eventually. So you could ultimately catch things up.

Derek Robinson 00:08:56 Right, exactly. So, taking some of that, that's, I think a good explanation of the technology of mirroring and how it works in InterSystems IRIS. Now my understanding is that for pretty much all of InterSystems products, this concept really works the same way, as far as how mirroring functionally works. But what are some of the differences you can talk about when it comes to HealthShare—and at a high level, why there's more that you need to kind of know without just being able to do it as simply as you maybe can with InterSystems IRIS?   

Bob Binstock 00:09:21 That an excellent question. One of the important things to remember about mirroring is that it synchronizes only the mirrored databases. So information that's stored on the primary, but not on those databases, such as for instance, user accounts and security configurations, isn't synchronized, and your software settings and configurations aren't synchronized. So if you want any of that stuff to be the same on the backup, when the backup takes over, you've got to do that yourself, or you have to arrange for it to be done, which can almost always be automated pretty easily. It's not a big deal. But with HealthShare, which is a complex application, usually involving multiple nodes, there's a lot of that kind of thing that you need to do that is required before you can start the mirror going. In other words, with a typical IRIS data server, it's not the end of the world if you haven't synchronized some information outside the mirror databases that maybe you should have. You can usually deal with that. In HealthShare the information is too complex and too distributed. So there's a lot of things that you must do when setting up a HealthShare mirror that would be considered optional or, you know, things to consider when setting up a simple data server mirror. So it's really important for anyone using mirroring in HealthShare to, you know, go through all that documentation and make sure all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed.

Derek Robinson 00:10:55 Right. And you can thank Bob afterwards for having that documentation be very helpful for you once you go through this process. So kind of moving into some of the, why does this matter? We talked about it a little bit at the top about some of the importance, you mentioned Amazon as an example, which is a really good one. If you have a couple others, like what are some common real-world use cases for mirroring databases that people might not think of, or that kind of is a good way to put it in perspective of why this is important?

Bob Binstock 00:11:20 So the first thing to do is…I mentioned the fact that basically almost every business or organization lives online now. The other thing to remember is that the amounts of data are truly staggering. So number one, you need your applications to keep running. Number two, you need to keep up with the data. If you miss some, it can be catastrophic. Let's say you are a manufacturer and you've equipped your factory with the latest Internet of Things technology to monitor all your devices. You can look at returns from your machinery and know exactly what's going on. Well, you can't afford gaps in that data. If you try to analyze it, your analysis will be wrong 'cause you're missing data. You might not get the alerts you need saying, you know, such-and-such equipment is about to break down unless certain maintenance is done, et cetera. And when you're talking about even one factory in IOT stuff, you're talking about just a constant, huge stream of data. Now, if you think about a financial services business, a big one, a worldwide one. So around the clock, they have customers, just to take one thing that happens with these companies, which is people trade stocks, right? When you order a stock trade, you want it now, you don't want it 20 minutes from now when they manage to bring the system back online, because things will have changed! People demand instant action. And again, if you think about the millions of users that a company may have, and in addition to user orders or requests, you've got constant querying going on. So you have transactions, which is one kind of query,  database query, and you have analysis, which is another. And meanwhile, you have the third kind, which is incoming data is streaming in from all sorts of sources. You've got to organize it and put it in the right places. So (if) any of these get interrupted, you've got a big problem. So high availability is just, I don't think anybody in a modern enterprise will consider any technology that doesn't address that.

Derek Robinson 00:13:34 Yeah. It seems like a linchpin for really all modern apps that we really have today. So kind of bringing it back a little bit, two more questions. One is just, you know, I think we kind of talked about this when you were talking about using it in IRIS, but just kind of to reiterate it for the IRIS users out there, or, you know, you can have a footnote about other technologies that use it as well. We talked about HealthShare, but how easy is it, in contrast, to do this in InterSystems IRIS?

Bob Binstock 00:14:00 It's very easy in IRIS. Although, you know, so much depends on it. It might be intimidating to think of what happens if you make a mistake, but really we've got it set up so that it pretty much, won't let you. If you're creating the databases, you're doing a new mirror and you're creating the databases then. It's very simple. You configure the two instances as a mirror. You might have to, if they don't already have SSL/TLS configurations for data security, you have to create those. That doesn't take a long time. And typically systems will in fact have that in place. You configure them as a mirror, and then you add the databases on the primary, which is, you know, it takes a minute or two to add a database in InterSystems IRIS. And as soon as you do that, the mirror makes copies the backup and starts synchronizing them. So that is very easy. If you're adding existing databases to a mirror, it takes a bit longer because the journal files for a mirror database are different from those for a non-mirror database. So you can't just stick the database in there. Once you add it, it starts creating mirror journal files. So at that point, you've got to pause activity, back up or copy the database on the primary, then restore that to the backup and add it to the mirror there. In other words, you're copying…you're backing up or copying a mirror database and putting it on the backup, and you add it to the mirror under the same name as it has on the primary. And again, we'll immediately start synchronizing, get it caught up very quickly. Now, obviously there are related setup tasks you may need to do, and that's true for any mirror, not just HealthShare. For instance, there are network considerations. We have a good amount of documentation about getting your network and your subnets set up the right way. There are different ways of redirecting those application connections after failover. Some of them are highly automatic, but of course the more automatic something is, you know, the more it requires getting set up in the first place. There's something called a virtual IP address, which basically means that the IP address represents whichever of the failover members is the primary at the time. That takes some configuration, but it's none of it's, you know, long-term or complex. Another concern in any failover technology is the risk that the backup will incorrectly take over while the primary is still operating, which would lead to two nodes, both trying to act as a primary, which of course is a disaster for the data. Mirroring, however, uses a node called the arbiter to make sure this doesn't happen. The arbiter stays in constant contact with both the primary and the backup, and essentially gives the backup a go/no-go decision when it wants to take over. At the same time, if the primary loses touch with both the backup and the arbiter, it automatically goes into a trouble state. The arbiter therefore knows that it can tell the backup to take over at that point without the risk of the primary coming back online. So the arbiter pretty much takes care of that concern.

Derek Robinson 00:17:21 Right. Cool. So lots of good stuff there on mirroring. And, of course you can check out more details on this with the documentation that I'm sure Bob has written a lot of at docs.intersystems.com, as well as our Online Learning content at learning.intersystems.com. So, Bob Binstock, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Bob Binstock Thank you, Derek.

Derek Robinson 00:17:40 So thanks to Bob for breaking down everything about mirroring. There's a lot of information about mirroring available in the documentation, including a First Look exercise on data resiliency and mirroring. You can head over to docs.intersystems.com to search through that content and to learn more. That'll do it for Episode Five. Don't forget to rate and subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. See you all next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com. To try InterSystems IRIS today, head over to https://www.intersystems.com/try and launch your instance! You can find our SQL QuickStart at https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?name=SQL%20QS, and if you'd like to discuss these SQL topics on the Developer Community, you can head over to https://community.intersystems.com. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that Subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode, I'll chat with Benjamin De Boe, Product Manager for Data Management and Analytics at InterSystems, about SQL performance in InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:00:40 Welcome to Episode 4 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. Hopefully you enjoyed the launch of the podcast earlier this month, which featured three episodes. Going forward, we plan to release one to two new episodes each month. So make sure you're subscribed on your favorite podcast app, and that way you won't miss any new episodes. We also have a new homepage for the podcast with an easy-to-remember URL; it's datapoints.intersystems.com. That page has the latest episode, more recent episodes, and the links to go subscribe on the different podcast apps. So go check that out for sure. Today I'm talking with Benjamin De Boe about SQL performance tips in InterSystems IRIS. Benjamin has worked with us and Learning Services quite a bit over the last few years to create engaging content in his areas of expertise. One of my favorite things about working with Benjamin is his ability to clearly convey concepts and really make them easy to understand. I think that comes through in our discussion here with Benjamin De Boe.

Derek Robinson 00:01:35 All right, and welcome to the podcast Benjamin De Boe, Product Manager for Data Management and Analytics here at InterSystems. Benjamin, how's it going?

Benjamin De Boe I'm doing great. Thanks, Derek. How are you?

Derek Robinson I'm doing great. Thanks. So today we're going to talk about SQL performance InterSystems IRIS. A lot of SQL developers out there might use different data models for their applications that use InterSystems IRIS, of course, we've mentioned in other episodes, we have multi-model database that you can kind of choose which approach based on your use case. But here we're going to talk about relational SQL, and where do we really begin? So I think what we're looking to you for here, some of the common practices and best, you know, tips for enhancing your performance and things like that. So what's kind of your overview level explanation of the SQL performance in IRIS, and where you'd start with it?

Benjamin De Boe 00:02:23 Okay. So there's a whole lot of things to talk about of course, when we talk about SQL performance, and much of that is already, these , and various separate articles. And there's also a great book in our documentation that's focused on SQL optimization, but let's take more of a problem-solving look at what's happening here. So imagine you have users that are complaining that the system is slow, or users that complain about this particular piece of the system is slow. Of course, the second ones are more easy to help, but the first category also exists.

Derek Robinson 00:03:00 Right. And so let's say that maybe I have a little bit more information to provide rather than everything is slow, including, you know, my computer starting, right? I think, if let's say I know that there's certain queries are slow, or I know that in general, this part of my application is slow, where can I go look to find the information I need to get that information? 

Benjamin De Boe 00:03:19 So one great entry point into this whole conversation is the lightweight queries statistics. So that's a bunch of metrics that are always on. So for every SQL statement that you issue, we collect a little bit of metrics that hardly cause any processing overhead, and that information is kept in the statement index. So that means that you can create, and you can see how often every query is called, and also how long it takes on average and what the standard deviation is in the execution time. So that already gives you a great help for those users that come to you and say, the whole application is slow. You can already use that information or the information from lightweight query stats to identify the ones that might be the likely cause. So there's two categories there, there's the queries that are just slow, that have a very long execution time, but some of those queries might be inherently slow. So if it's the big fat accounting query that needs to run once a year, that kind of gathers the whole detail from the whole year and touches the entire database, okay. That query may take half an hour to complete, but if it's only executed once a year, that's not too bad, but if it's something that gets executed thousands of times a day, and that can be brought from one and a half seconds to half a second, that's a much better investment of your tuning time. 

Derek Robinson 00:04:41 Right. So, yeah, it really depends on your situation and where it's smartest to put your attention toward as far as the different queries you're running and kind of the uses that you have for those.

Benjamin De Boe 00:04:51 Exactly. That's where the lightweight course statistics can help.

Derek Robinson  00:04:55 So, for me being someone who's not necessarily an expert in this, I see the term lightweight statistics, and I think there's probably a bunch more beyond that, right? I don't want to make it sound burdensome, but what else? Let's say I want to take a deeper dive than what I see in those lightweight statistics. What's kind of the next step that I would take as someone interested in that?

Benjamin De Boe 00:05:13 OK. So we don't call them heavyweight statistics, but there are other additional statistics that we can collect, but they're more for very involved analysis of one particular query or set of queries, that typically is better to involve InterSystems support for. But then there's a whole lot of stuff that you can do all by yourself, a sort of little bit of investigation and experimentation on how to improve your query's performance.

Derek Robinson 00:05:37 Right. So as far as some of those pieces of investigation, maybe I see one query that I want to, it's really bugging me, and the performance isn't great. What more can I look at to see as far as, not just the speed, but overall the health and the behavior of that query? Like what can I really dive into to kind of see, you know, fine tuning that performance and really optimizing it as best can?

Benjamin De Boe 00:05:58 The first step is obviously check out what it's actually doing. So checking what the query plan is like. So what the query optimizer comes up with as the sort of execution strategy for giving you the answer for the question you asked through SQL. So that query plan is sort of a step-by-step thing that describes the actual code that gets executed for satisfying your query and might have steps, such as look at this particular index with the user-supplied value; use the IDs you retrieve from that index to look into the master map, which has the main table data; return those rows; join to another table. So that's what a query plan looks like. And you can get those, you can read those through the system Management Portal. You can read those using the explain command and on the SQL prompt, or through an ObjectScript API, if you wish.

Derek Robinson 00:06:51 Right. So, let's say I take all those steps, and now it's basically given me the optimization that we should apply and that this query should receive, how much should I trust it? But like, is that always correct? Is it pretty much magic, or what things should you maybe watch out for, or are there any pitfalls that you might run into?

Benjamin De Boe 00:07:10 It's very close to magic, but it's still software. So essentially what it does is, and there's decades worth of engineering that went into it, it's looking at the question you asked, the SQL query that you presented, and looking at the schema, so your tables and that contained the data to satisfy that query. And then it's going to come up with a couple of different plans. It's going to make an estimation of the cost of each of those plans, and then eventually elect the one that supposedly has the lowest cost. But obviously that cost formula is based on the information that you're giving it. So that information that you're giving it is not just the schema information, but also the statistics of what data actually is in your schema. So we call that the table statistics. So table statistics are, for example, how many rows are actually in my table? What's the average length of a row to be able to estimate the cost of retrieving a row from this, of course? How selective are individual fields of every table? So if I do a filter on this field or on this field, which one is going to filter the set of rows to retrieve from disk, more efficiently? So those are extremely valuable pieces of information that go into the query optimizer and help it do its magic.

Derek Robinson 00:08:28 Right. So from a layman's point of view, it kind of feels like that's basically metadata about your table that helps the optimizer know…not the data, I don't care about what's in the table, but what are the characteristics of the table, to know how to try to optimize those queries? Is that right?  

Benjamin De Boe 00:08:46 Exactly, exactly. And that's also why, of course, those need to be up to date. Those need to be in line with the data that's actually in there. So, when you initialize a table, it starts off empty, and we'll take some default values to go by with, but then if it turns out that your query plans are not according to what you thought they would be, it might be that it's just basing the query plan on outdated information about those table statistics. So the single most important thing that many of our support calls start with and sometimes also end with, is just gathering those table statistics again, and making sure that the query optimizer has the best information to make the best decisions and do its magic.

Derek Robinson 00:09:28 Right. So, given that last thing you just said, obviously sometimes an important thing that could be very easy and save time with support, that you don't really have to be spending…how do I gather these statistics easily and quickly?

Benjamin De Boe 00:09:39 So again, through the Management Portal, there's a menu option through which you can gather those statistics. There's a method on the system SQL utility, that's an ObjectSript API, but the easiest way to do it is just to use the SQL commands that does, of course, need to read the actual data in there in order to figure out what is the most selective, what's the selectivity of the fields, how many rows are in there, and that takes some effort. So you can sample that so that it only looks at a subset of the data. You can schedule that, so that it runs off peak, but that's sort of easy to schedule. And, it could be something that you run once a week, or maybe once after a certain ramp-up period. Those table statistics are typically fairly stable, and you would not have to run it that regularly, maybe once a week or once a month, would be enough again.

Derek Robinson 00:10:37 Interesting. So basically, as far as that part of it, just gather those statistics to update that information for the optimizer be able to use, and then I'm pretty much done at that point, as far what my obligation is to it.

Benjamin De Boe 00:10:49 As far as obligations go, those are all very simple things that you can do that don't take any additional knowledge or specialty or consideration. Those are almost no-brainers. Once you have that information, with the right table statistics, queries are still going slow, even though it supposedly takes the best possible access path, that it might be worth considering looking at additional indices, but only then. So there's no point in adding indices after you've seen the particular workload, or before you've considered a particular workload and before you've made sure that it's looking at up-to-date table statistics. And then there's the whole art of identifying the right index. And maybe art is a little bit of an overstatement, but there's several different types of indices that each have their advantages, and cases where they're best fit for. But in general, if you have a field with a low cardinality, so few different values, use a bitmap index. If it's a field with more distinct values, for example, date fields, use a regular index, and that's a really good start, and that can get you going quite quickly. 

Derek Robinson 00:12:01 Nice. Yeah, I think that's, obviously a lot more you can do to stay on top of it and make sure that you're continuing to get good performance. So as far as additional improvements to the platform, right, going forward, if I'm a developer who does this all the time, and I'm really looking at my queries a lot, what can I be excited about in the coming months, years, versions of InterSystems IRIS, that's kind of in the plans for what could make this even better and even easier for developers going forward?

Benjamin De Boe 00:12:26 So very shortly, we'll be releasing our SAM product: System Alerting and Monitoring, which is sort of a standalone thing that kind of watches carefully over your InterSystems deployment. And that will also contain a nice interface on top of those lightweight core statistics that allows you to quickly drill into individual queries, look at those query plans where we're going to add a little more metadata to those query plans so that they get more readable and actionable. So for example, include in the query plan itself, how recent the table statistics were that it based its decision on. So that will help you identify if that is something that needs action. Also include which indices it used and which ones it didn't use. So that may all be valuable input to those optimization decisions. And then, finally, we're also going to work on some more automation for automatically gathering those table statistics and keeping those up to date without causing some unforeseen overhead on your system. And eventually also provide some automated recommendations on which indices might be good additions based on table statistics, and statistics.

Derek Robinson 00:13:37 Nice. So a lot of good features coming up, it sounds like. And, you know, if people are in the interim before those make it even easier, and they're kind of just going through all your queries and assessing your performance, short of calling support, which we're always fine with everybody calling support, because our support team is great here, but what steps could you take on your own to engage with the community, or what you can find online and things like that?

Benjamin De Boe 00:14:00 The Online Learning website is definitely a great resource to find information, but then also the Developer Community has a lot of interesting articles already on this subject. And of course you're always free to ask your questions right there. And if all else fails, just call in the cavalry. Our support team is ready for your call!

Derek Robinson 00:14:18 Very true. They are ready. But I have seen, on the Developer Community, a lot of good conversations on various topics, and sometimes even the InterSystems people helping with the problem learn something on their own, based on their discussion with users of our technology.

Benjamin De Boe 00:14:31 Exactly. It's really a very diverse community. Is also has, our developers are looking at it. Our support folks are looking at it, our customers, our partners. So you really have people representing all different perspectives at problems…and solutions. 

Derek Robinson 00:14:48 Yeah, absolutely. And that's the important part. So, Benjamin De Boe, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Benjamin De Boe You're welcome. Thanks, Derek.

Derek Robinson  00:14:59 So a big thank you to Benjamin for breaking down the tips and techniques for optimizing your SQL performance in queries within InterSystems IRIS. I thought that was really helpful. Like he mentioned, there's a lot of interesting discussion about SQL topics on the Developer Community. And we also have an SQL QuickStart exercise on our Learning site. If you're just getting started with SQL in InterSystems IRIS, or you want to try something hands-on, that link will be in the description of this podcast episode. So that's a wrap for Episode 4, and remember to rate and subscribe on the Data Points podcast listing on whatever app you use. On Episode 5, we'll be covering Mirroring in InterSystems IRIS. See you then!

To reach out to Thomas Dyar about IntegratedML, you can send him an email at thomas.dyar@intersystems.com.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com. To try InterSystems IRIS today, head over to https://www.intersystems.com/try and launch your instance!

Derek Robinson 00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode, I'll chat with Thomas Dyar, one of the product specialists at InterSystems, about IntegratedML in InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 00:38 Welcome to Episode 3 of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. My name is Derek Robinson. As I've been mentioning in our first few episodes, we're excited about the launch of this podcast, and we've already released two other episodes along with this one for you to check out. In this episode, I'll be talking about machine learning and IntegratedML with Thomas Dyar. Thomas is a product specialist here at InterSystems, focused on the area of machine learning. In the interview, we're going to start with some interesting perspective on machine learning in general, and then segue into one of the exciting new features that's coming to InterSystems IRIS data platform, and that's IntegratedML. IntegratedML is really built for the SQL developer who wants to incorporate machine learning into their application, but they may not have the resources at their disposal to do it the traditional way. I'll leave the more thorough explanation to the expert. So here's my interview with Tom.

Derek Robinson 1:31 All right, and welcome to the podcast Thomas Dyar, one of our product specialists here at InterSystems. Thomas, how's it going?

Thomas Dyar 01:37 Very good. Thanks, Derek.

Derek Robinson 01:38 Yeah, so, today we're going to be talking about machine learning, which is one of your areas of expertise both in your career, I think, and here at InterSystems with the products that you oversee. So let's dive right in and get started. But before we get into the product, let's talk about machine learning in general. It's really a very popular new topic that's been emerging in the last few years as something that's really, really relevant. What is machine learning to you and how did you first get interested in it?

Thomas Dyar 2:05 So machine learning is essentially taking whatever data that you have and asking a computer to figure out what it is about that data that's interesting. And that also could be relevant to what you want to do with your application. So I got interested in machine learning in high school, and really what I was interested in at that time was how the brain worked. And being able to model the brain in a way that you could take the crazy complexity of all the neurons and distill that down into a mathematical representation of how those neurons would work, and make it possible for a human to think, was just extremely interesting. And as I got into actually trying to build those kinds of models, I realized that there were a lot of applications that you could actually build that would be useful to humans.

Derek Robinson 03:05 Yeah. Interesting. So, you know, to be honest, I hadn't actually taken that perspective on it, but it's kind of cool to frame it that way. So as you've gotten more into it, what are some of the most important and kind of significant, maybe life- changing, applications that you see in the world today that involve machine learning?

Thomas Dyar 03:21 So I'd say one of the most exciting areas is healthcare. Healthcare is a realm where we've spent a lot of time last 10 to 20 years taking all of the data from doctors and putting it into computers. Now you have a mountain of data and you have extremely life-altering problems to apply that to, whether you want to learn how to treat someone better or avoid some kind of a bad outcome, say a complication from surgery, you now have a huge amount of data that you could look at and decide whether or not…what you should do with that.

Derek Robinson 04:06 Right. So yeah, I think healthcare is really a well-known one…with machine learning. And I think what you brought up there is really important, not just from how well suited it can be for that amount of data, but also how significant it is, in that it has an impact on lives. Any non-healthcare examples come to mind that really jump out at you as good use cases? Because I think in some of our previous episodes, we've talked about how sometimes people see InterSystems and they associate healthcare IT because they see our logo, and they see how big of a player we are in healthcare. But for the people that aren't in healthcare, there's a lot that they can leverage on our technology stack as well. Any good ones come to mind as far as really cool machine learning applications that aren't in the healthcare space that you've seen?

Thomas Dyar 04:48 So definitely in the area of logistics is another application field where InterSystems technology is used. And there you have kind of optimization problems. Things like, well, you have a shipping company that needs to optimize how they move their ships and their infrastructure around to be able to meet the customer demands in real time, be able to lower the costs. There, machine learning is also very applicable. You can throw a bunch of data at it and determine the best place to put a ship or put a box, and be able to get it to the customer in the optimal way.

Derek Robinson 05:33 Right, interesting. Yeah. And so the more you think about it, the more it opens your mind to even more examples that can really take that data and use it in an effective way. So let's transition this into our InterSystems stack, right? One of the new features that's coming out for InterSystems IRIS is IntegratedML. That's one of the products we mentioned that you are managing and overseeing here at InterSystems. Tell us what IntegratedML is, who it's for, and what it can do for those developers.

Thomas Dyar 06:01 So IntegratedML is a new capability that we're placing within our SQL environment. It's an all-SQL feature that is turnkey machine learning. (You) don't need to install anything. It's going to become, out of the box, able to be applied to your problems. And then it's going to bring the best-of-breed machine learning frameworks right into your SQL environment. So an application developer that knows the data that knows SQL is going to be able to train models and then be able to use those models to make predictions and make their application smarter.

Derek Robinson 06:41 Interesting. Okay. So that's a cool kind of brief explanation of what it does. And I think in the little amount that I've kind of been looking at this stuff and kind of seeing it from the curious perspective, looking at it more closely, should these developers think that it's just instant magic, right? Like is it just kind of like flip a switch and all of a sudden you don't need your data scientists anymore? Or is it more of a thing to kind of open the door for them and kind of get them along the right path, let them taste it a little bit and kind of get you primed to be able to go even further later? Well, how would you frame it for those developers?

Thomas Dyar 07:14 Yeah, it's definitely not to replace data scientists. There's a lot of heavy-duty statistics and math, and also judgment that's required in determining where machine learning is useful and not. But as far as the ability to get a read on whether or not your data is good for machine learning, IntegratedML is a great place to start and will get you the basics of a machine learning model and also focus on being able to use the predictions from a machine learning model right in right in an application. So instead of spending all your time trying to install some framework, learn Python, figure out how to go between Python and SQL and all those things that are necessary to actually put a machine learning model into production, IntegratedML provides all the plumbing and makes that process a lot easier. So you can focus on your data, focus on the problem, and let the computer do what it's good at, which is putting it all together.

Derek Robinson 08:24 Right, right. Interesting. So it kind of sounds like for the developer, like you said, that knows their data, that knows how to use SQL, that knows how to…is really focused on those things in their application, this lets them take this buzzword that they've been hearing all over all over the industry, right—machine learning—and being able to apply some models and create some models and train those and really effectively use them on their data. So for some of the audience that might have a little bit more expertise in machine learning and maybe on InterSystems IRIS data platform as well as maybe legacy products, have used the previously existing architecture, which could be the Spark connector and loading PMML files for your machine learning models, how does that kind of play together with the new vision of IntegratedML and InterSystems IRIS? And what would be the message to the people that do have some experience with machine learning in that context and now seeing IntegratedML come into the picture?

Thomas Dyar 09:21 So the focus of IntegratedML is really on the SQL experience and the SQL developer, so it is really there to kind of streamline the process and also bring these frameworks into the development process and make that really easy, focus on deployment. What we've had before is more of a feature set for experts. So our Spark connector was good for users that already had either a Spark cluster or experience with Spark and wanted to then take the models that they would build in that environment and easily deploy those. Whereas IntegratedML, you don't need to start out with a Spark cluster. You don't have to have a huge infrastructure there. It's going to provide that on- ramp to machine learning much more quickly.

Derek Robinson 10:18 Right. Kind of an easier way for these developers to access this, and removing barriers that previously existed to really implement machine learning into their applications. That's really cool. So kind of wrapping up and summarizing a little bit, what do you see as the future of IntegratedML? Now I know you've kind of given us an example of it. When can developers maybe look to hopefully try to see more coming out about this, and like anything you kind of see as the vision, and what if someone right now listening to this is interested in what you're saying and kind of really, it's kind of intriguing them as an SQL developer, what's their next step, and what should they look for in the future?

Thomas Dyar 10:53  Well, it's coming out in the spring, and anybody that's interested can get on the Developer Community and look for content there, ask questions there. And if you don't find what you're looking for, feel free to email me. My email is going to be in the description of this podcast, and I'd love to hear from you and find out any feedback you have, and any questions I'll try to answer.

Derek Robinson 11:16 Absolutely. So, Tom Dyar, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Thomas Dyar Thank you very much, Derek. This was fun.

Derek Robinson 11:25 Thanks again to Tom for sitting down with us. I really liked his perspective at the beginning on what got him into machine learning and kind of how powerful it can be. It brings into context just how amazing thinking and the human brain really is and how it all works, and really highlights how impactful some of the advances in technology can be…that can bring us closer to replicating that magic. On the IntegratedML front, there'll be much more content in the coming months for you to check out. As Tom mentioned this spring, it'll be released for general availability with InterSystems IRIS. In the interim, if you're super eager to learn more right away, shoot Tom an email. We put his email in the description of this podcast, but otherwise, definitely leverage the Developer Community, community.intersystems.com, and browse our learning content at learning.intersystems.com to learn more about machine learning features and InterSystems IRIS features and kind of how it all can fit together and kind of pique your imagination of what you might do with it down the road. I'm sure there are users on the Developer Community that would love to chime in with their thoughts as well. So hopefully you enjoyed Episode 3 and remember, make sure to find us on your favorite podcast app and hit that subscribe button. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com. To try InterSystems IRIS today, head over to https://www.intersystems.com/try and launch your instance!

TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that Subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode, I'll chat with Luca Ravazzolo, Product Manager for cloud and containers at InterSystems, about Kubernetes.

Derek Robinson 00:39 Welcome to Episode Two of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. My name is Derek Robinson. As you may have heard in Episode One, we're excited about the launch of this podcast, and we've already released three episodes for you to check out. In this episode, I'll be talking Kubernetes with Luca Ravazzolo. Luca is a Product Manager here at InterSystems, focused on the area of cloud and containers. He brings a ton of experience to the table. He celebrated 30 years at InterSystems this past fall. What you're going to hear about Derek Robinson 00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that Subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode, I'll chat with Luca Ravazzolo, Product Manager for cloud and containers at InterSystems, about Kubernetes.

Derek Robinson 00:39 Welcome to Episode Two of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. My name is Derek Robinson. As you may have heard in Episode One, we're excited about the launch of this podcast, and we've already released three episodes for you to check out. In this episode, I'll be talking Kubernetes with Luca Ravazzolo. Luca is a Product Manager here at InterSystems, focused on the area of cloud and containers. He brings a ton of experience to the table. He celebrated 30 years at InterSystems this past fall. What you're going to hear about Kubernetes really builds off of the concept of using Docker containers. I'm sure we'll have episodes covering Docker concepts in the future, but for now, definitely browse our learning catalog for starter information about containers, if you're interested in them. Kubernetes is one of these newer technologies that really allows you to take your container approach to the next level. Rather than diving into those details, I'll leave the real explanation to the expert. So here's my interview with Luca. 

Derek Robinson 01:38 Alrighty. So welcome to the podcast Luca Ravazzolo, Product Manager for cloud and containers here at InterSystems. Luca, how are you doing?

Luca Ravazzolo  I'm doing very well, Derek. How are you doing?

Derek Robinson. Good. So we're happy to have you on the podcast here today and we're going to be talking about a pretty cool, a fairly new cloud topic today, which is Kubernetes. So, I know that you've done some stuff on this at our Global Summit, at InterSystems here, and there's a lot of cool stuff to talk about. So why don't we start with, for the new person, for someone who might not understand what this technology is, what is Kubernetes, in brief?

Luca Ravazzolo 02:06 Well, Kubernetes is a platform, first of all. What does that mean? It means that it is a full suite of software if you like, that holds, that can hold up your application. What does that mean in a little bit more details? Well, it allows you to define how your application is going to run and consider that, even cloud service providers, like, AWS, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Azure, they all have an implementation or support Kubernetes. But why is that interesting? Well, because of two factors, I think. One is that Kubernetes was born to make sure that your application runs all the time. That's its job. It keeps monitoring that all the workloads that you put up there are actually running all the time. And if anything dies, it picks it up again. So it looks at your definition says, That's what you want me to run. You want me to run your 32 instances of this app, and if 31 are running now, it's going to pick that 32^nd and make sure that it does run. And the second part of why Kubernetes is interesting is because it allows you to define all the pieces of an application. If, so, let me just say, if you have like the front-end pages of an application, that's interesting, but that's only a part of it. You need some business logic behind it, right? And if you are a developer, the business logic, that's only part of it. You need somewhere to store information, for example, of the purchases that somebody is doing, right? So you need a database on the back end.

And then, if it's Black Friday, what do you do? Well, you need to make sure that you sustain the new and biggest and largest workload that you have. And so you need to dynamically create more web servers, et cetera. What Kubernetes can do is all that; not only that, it allows you to actually define all of those pieces, all those components, and even load balancers and web servers and DNS engines inside the platform itself. And so it really allows you to define the application, how the application has to run, and that's very powerful; we do not have anything like that in the market right now.

Derek Robinson 04:22 Yeah, that's really cool. So I think — and we won't cover this in this episode — but one of the precursors to this technology is really understanding containers and Docker containers and kind of having that deployment, right? And so, me personally, I've worked with Docker containers a lot, but really only in my local environment. So it sounds like one of the biggest appeals of Kubernetes can be this really enterprise-level deployment of containers. And really when you're looking to do more, like you said, if you have, you know, 30 instances of something or a bunch of load balancers, and really mapping out the whole configuration of your application environment that uses containers, is really the biggest advantage of Kubernetes, it sounds like.  

Luca Ravazzolo 04:59 Absolutely. And you really hit the nail there, right? So we've all worked with containers. They're great for developers to just, you know, get the code, configure up all the dependencies of your work, of your libraries that you need, run it on your laptop, and that's great. But what happens when you actually start defining an application, you know, as you said, which need a lot more pieces around it? Well, there's a nice little tool that Docker built, which is called a Docker compose. So you can work with multiple containers, but you're still confined and able to run those containers within one single machine, right? Your laptop typically, or maybe a high-end server, if you want to test some performance issues. But what happens when you go to the cloud, when you go to a data center where you have, you know, many nodes, many VMs, many and, and you need to scatter your workload across many of them so you can take advantage of all the and all the memory that are available.

Well then you need to start installing, you know, things like network overlay layers and then, how do you know if those containers are running properly or not, et cetera. And that's what Kubernetes does for you. So you prepare those nodes, it creates this overlay network for you. It handles all, literally everything that is done in terms of networking and DNS naming and all those complicated parts. And that's why it's very powerful. One other strong characteristic, let me add, just came to my mind, is that as you define your application within the Kubernetes platform, that platform and that definition is totally portable. So if you're working in AWS today and you go this YAML definition, I know you're looking at me strange, you know? YAML, we all love to hate that. But you know, it works, right? For now. So that same definition, you can bring it on site, on prem, maybe with some bare metal because you want, you know, more performance. And that same definition will run there too with the Kubernetes platform orchestrating everything. And that's very, very powerful. So an organization gets portability, they're not locked into any cloud and they get a platform that manages their workload. That's very powerful.

Derek Robinson 07:13 Right. Scaling up some of those benefits of containers like portability and efficiency that you can really do for a whole orchestrated environment there. So kind of taking everything you just sort of said now and moving into maybe a little, an example or two, what are some of the, as you've talked with either customers of InterSystems systems or just other people that you've seen at conferences or just in your networks, what are some of the coolest, or maybe one or two cool use cases that you've seen where Kubernetes has really helped to take someone's environment or application environment to the next level and really leverage all these things that you're talking about?

Luca Ravazzolo 07:46 Yeah, I've got a couple of examples that really spoke to me. One is, a couple of developers started to work with it, and they said, this is great, you know, but I'm a full-stack developer, and typically I want to test it on a medium size type of an environment out there, you know six, 12 nodes. So the easiest thing is just to go on the cloud. So, they provision the infrastructure and they say, well, everything is in containers now, so how do I do that? Well, the easiest thing was for them to just run Kubernetes in the specific cloud. So GKE for example, for Google, or EKS in AWS. And then all of a sudden, they have the possibility to just really run the application, all the components, even components that they did not develop themselves. They were just pulling containers, you know, let's say, back end, the new version of the database with the new schema that the organization has just developed. And he has just developed, for example, some new business logic, and he was just putting everything together on several high-end machines. He was really testing it through properly instead of just running either everything on his laptop or trying to configure everything himself manually, just one single manual YAML definition with everything configured. And it was up and running in a few minutes. So that was the single developer, they really wanted to monitor and follow through the workload, the data coming through where it was going, et cetera. And the other one was other customers that are very close to go to production in Kubernetes, and they were just shocked that sometimes, they left the Kubernetes servers up and running, and then in the morning they come up and, you know, the system had fallen over, but they didn't know if they didn't go and have a look at the logs – it had s. You know, one of the two instances had died, but the application was up and running. And they were just shocked themselves, you know, no pager, that you know whatever you wanted up and running is up and running all the time. And that's part of its job. You know, this controller that keeps checking that everything else is consistent as your definition, which is pretty cool.

Derek Robinson 09:57 Yeah. Cool. And I want to transition to a couple last points about how it relates to InterSystems IRIS. But one thing before we move on, I just want to emphasize too that something you said at the end there, which is kind of that self-healing nature of Kubernetes is…I think you can't emphasize that enough as far as one of the advantages where in that use case, you come in and you didn't even realize something went wrong because it really has this ability to fix itself with some of those failovers and, and bring up a new node in place of it. So I think it's a good thing to emphasize there. 

Luca Ravazzolo 10:25 Yeah, absolutely. The self-healing part is very powerful. And the other one of course is that you can auto scale workload automatically so you can set thresholds and say, "Hey, Kubernetes, if these two particular nodes go above, you know, 90% CPU for example, you really need to do something for me. So spin up another couple of these nodes that…and it can do that for you. So you can set these rules as a part of your application so that when Black Friday comes, you just prepare, but you don't have to panic.

Derek Robinson 10:55 Exactly. Cool. So that's really exciting. Moving to kind of the last portion, which is, shifting into our InterSystems IRIS users that are listening, right? So whether that's InterSystems IRIS, or even other InterSystems products that are older than IRIS and people might move to it. What should people know about the ability and what IRIS is doing to work with Kubernetes?

Luca Ravazzolo 11:16 As you said earlier on, you know, it really is an orchestrator for containers. So by the mere fact that we have IRIS in a container, where we can run within a Kubernetes cluster or orchestrate a platform. But there's more to that because things can be complicated to define. Just because I've got this little YAML template, but I might want to put some rules. For example, I want to put some rules, some affinity rule that I want to run my IRIS instance because it's very important to me as a back end database on that particular node that has 32 cores. So you can put all this type of rules, but then when you get into the specific semantics of InterSystems IRIS like, I want, for example, a mirror pair. Well, Kubernetes doesn't know anything about our mirror pair or our ECP communication. And so what we've done is, we built an InterSystems Kubernetes operator that allows you to define all these particular semantics that we have with our product. You just define in the InterSystems Kubernetes operator these particular that you want to run, and it just goes and configures everything for you. And that's very powerful. 

Derek Robinson 12:23 That's great. So lots of stuff coming. Last question here. Just kind of taking a step back in general, as you look forward, you know, with the possibilities with Kubernetes, what excites you the most about maybe what's untapped potential, or really how you see this going forward into the future?

Luca Ravazzolo 12:39 Well, I think we're just at the beginning of it, right? If you look at the GitHub repo, since 2015 when…or was it 2014? Well, anyway, a few years back when Google released it, the Kubernetes ecosystem, you know, even get GitHub, you know, a site where more than 300,000 people working on that, it's really exciting. And they're divided even into special interest groups. So if you're interested, people should go there and participate and give opinion for storage, security, all kinds of stuff. I mean we're really talking really high level here, but it really is a full platform. And so I think what we're going to see in the future is a lot more Kubernetes managers, just like some of the work that, AWS and Google and Azure have done and, and a lot more automation, a lot more monitoring and a full ecosystem that allows you to really run even in a more automated way than it is now. So I think we're just the beginning and the portability that offers is just fantastic. So none of us are locked into any specific solution.

Derek Robinson 13:50 Yeah. Very exciting stuff. So Luca Ravazzolo, thank you so much for joining us.

Luca Ravazzolo 13:54 Thank you, Derek. It has been a pleasure. Yeah, see you soon!

Derek Robinson 14:01 Thanks again to Luca for sitting down with us and giving us some really interesting stuff there on Kubernetes. One little side note that might be helpful for those of you looking up content on Kubernetes. This is something that tripped me up a little bit when I was first researching it, is it's often stylized or abbreviated as K8S in written form. As far as I could tell, that's pretty simply swapping in an 8 for the eight letters in the middle of the word Kubernetes between the K and the S. Works for me, but if anyone knows more reasoning behind that, leave some comments for us in the Developer Community to enlighten us on that abbreviation. So hopefully you enjoyed episode two in our conversation with Luca. Remember, make sure to find us on your favorite podcast app and subscribe so that you never miss an episode when it's released. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on Data Points.

For more information about Data Points, visit https://datapoints.intersystems.com. To try InterSystems IRIS today, head over to https://www.intersystems.com/try and launch your instance! You can also check out more materials at https://gettingstarted.intersystems.com. 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Derek Robinson 00:01 Welcome to Data Points, a podcast by InterSystems Learning Services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for Data Points and hitting that subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson, and on today's episode I'll chat with Jenny Ames, the team lead of Online Learning content here at InterSystems, about InterSystems IRIS data platform.

Derek Robinson 00:39 Welcome to Episode One of Data Points by InterSystems Learning Services. My name is Derek Robinson. I'm an online course developer here at InterSystems, and all of us in Learning Services are really, really excited about launching this podcast. We have three different episodes queued up for launch ready for your listening, so definitely check out the others after you're done listening to this one. In this episode, I'll be chatting with Jenny Ames. Jenny is the team lead of Online Learning content, as I mentioned in the intro, and she has over 10 years of experience with our technology stack. So in our discussion, we're going to cover the basics of InterSystems IRIS, what some of its best features are, some of the best use cases that she's seen. And really just kind of in general talk about what this product is, what some of its healthcare extensions are, and how it can really impact your application development being a developer, developing data-intensive applications. So without further ado, here's my interview with Jenny Ames.

Derek Robinson 01:36 All right. And welcome to the podcast Jenny Ames, the team lead of Online Learning content here at InterSystems. Jenny, how's it going?

Jenny Ames Hi Derek. It's going well. How are you?

Derek Robinson Good. I'm doing great. And we're excited to launch Data Points and have you as one of our first guests here to talk about InterSystems IRIS, and what it is for the people that might not know, and also for InterSystems users that are interested in learning more and kind of the context of our technology stack. So first, why don't we start by introducing yourself, kind of letting us know what you do here at InterSystems and how long you've been here and your experience in the InterSystems world?

Jenny Ames 02:07 Sure. Yeah. So I just celebrated 10 years back in June. First five years I was a classroom trainer, taught on most of our products: Caché, Ensemble, Health Connect, most of the HealthShare class, and really enjoyed that, but some life changes meant I wanted to be around here a little bit more, so I have been doing online training for the past five and a half years now.

Derek Robinson  02:33 Nice. That's awesome. So you're obviously qualified to talk about what we're going to talk about today. So let's start with the question of what InterSystems IRIS data platform is, right? I think you know, start with maybe a high-level example or description for people that have never seen it before and then we can kind of go a little bit more detail into what some of its functionality is. So if I see you in an elevator today and I ask you, what is InterSystems IRIS, what would be your answer?

Jenny Ames 02:58 So I like to think of InterSystems IRIS as really three main pieces. So it's the database. So you can store data, you can retrieve data. It also has a built-in development environment to build in the logic. It is also an integration engine, so you can share data very easily between different systems, and there's some great UIs that help you to do that quickly without much code. You can customize it because you have that database level as well, which is great. And then it's also an analytics platform that allows you to build in machine learning to show dashboards and analyze data to really make sense of your data and then build on that. There's even some natural language processing. So analyzing large pieces of text to find positive things or summarize the text.

Derek Robinson 03:52 Yeah. Which becomes more and more important I think today with the constant streams of information coming into your applications from all different sources, not always as tightly defined and lined up as what you need your data to be in a traditional relational format where you have, you know, all the properties and everything, right? So you kind of mentioned those three prongs of it that you could summarize at a high level. You know, let's start with the database part because I think any application developer who's going to be building a data-intensive application needs to start with the database, right? Like they need their data to be somewhere. So before going into the other features, what separates InterSystems IRIS just from the database perspective, compared to other databases people could choose from?

Jenny Ames 04:30 Yeah, that's a good question. Well, first of all, we have logic built right into InterSystems IRIS, so you can build in some questions right there. If you are familiar with Caché, which is one of our other products that we've had for a while, some of the things that are new are some of the language interoperability pieces, so you can still leverage your other applications that are built with Java.net, Python, or Node.js, and then integrate with the database platform of InterSystems IRIS. But I would say some of the things that really make it stand out are the reliability. We're in a lot of markets, healthcare being a big one because of its reliability, financial institutions as well. And that's because of the reliability we have and the security that's built into that.

Derek Robinson 05:27 Right, exactly. So some good elements there and good requirements for anybody using a database to build their application and host their data and really be able to work with their data. One more, one I want to touch on, which I know is a little bit related to the language interoperability, is also the model flexibility when it comes to different using different models for your database. I know this is when we've talked to developers at events, sometimes this is one that makes them stop and say, wait, tell me more about that one. So give me a quick example and kind of description of InterSystems IRIS multi-model capability at the database level.

Jenny Ames 06:00 Yeah. So multi-model…most databases they choose one model that they support, whether it's an object database or relational database. And we say, why choose? There's different reasons to do object access or relational access. From something like Java, it's already an object model. And so being able to just save an object directly is a huge benefit because it saves both the developer time and the time for…it doesn't have to transform the data to a relational…to a row…to be able to do that. But doing something like you know, select all people that work at a company, like that's really easy to do with relational model. And so we provide the opportunity to use the model that really works best for each task and then integrate it all within one application.

Derek Robinson 06:45 Right. Without having to duplicate it or without really create different kind of approaches to your same problem and your different variations within the problem. It's really cool. And by the way, along that topic, I think a future episode of Data Points could involve a little bit of a deeper dive into how that happens, with our globals and kind of the way those work. And I have a person or two in mind that would be great at explaining those concepts at InterSystems, but going into a little bit more of a discussion about the image of InterSystems and InterSystems products as a whole. I know we've before been at events where people will see our signage, people will see our branding, and they kind of drop InterSystems into a healthcare bucket. Right? It looks like you're a healthcare IT company, so that's cool. Tell me more about that, but why should people not immediately drop it into that bucket if that's not where they are? Right? If someone is not in the healthcare space, what are some of the reasons that they shouldn't immediately assume that InterSystems is really just healthcare IT software?

Jenny Ames 07:38 Yeah. well we are in healthcare for a reason. Again, because of the reliability and the scalability and the security that we've built into InterSystems IRIS and our other products. And so yeah, we're in those spaces for reason. But those features are really important in multiple verticals. So, you know, financial institutions, you know, money is really important to people and so being able to use InterSystems IRIS and leveraging those features is really, really important. But you know, like I mentioned, I was in the classroom for the first five years, and I've seen some different use cases that I thought were really cool from some of our customers. Some with, you know, a car manufacturing company where they were basically bringing in and handling car parts and being able to manage all that data. I've been at…there is a customer that did…they were basically bringing in data from multiple different police precincts and the data was stored in different formats and so they had to transform that data. And then they brought it all into one system into our product and then they built dashboards on top of that to be able to analyze the data and do really cool things with the data itself.

Derek Robinson 09:00 Interesting. Yeah, and I think that that last use case you mentioned could serve as the basis for a deeper dive into a discussion on our interoperability features in IRIS, right? And I think there's a lot more that you could go into there with, you mentioned transforming data into the right format. Some of that is where you start to get into the core of what those healthcare features can be sometimes as far as the biggest things you need in healthcare. So do you have anything else you wanted to add on that part, or…?

Jenny Ames 09:26 Yeah. We have some built-in features that really help in the healthcare world or with you know, some prebuilt components. But we've also been building in more features for other markets as well, where you can do things like a record mapper and bring data in without any code. But again, you can also customize it completely to be able to make the data in just the right format. But the interoperability stuff is actually a passion of mine. I really like, I actually have a lot of fun building integrations and playing with that and learning more myself. But yeah, I really like that feature of InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 10:00 For sure. And so just one more thing along the use case before…we're going to get to healthcare in a minute, but one of the other use cases that is often talked about with InterSystems IRIS and kind of highlights some of those scalability, reliability and really the vast capability of InterSystems IRIS to handle these data loads is the European Space Agency.  That's one that we've talked about a lot. Can you tell us a little bit about that use case, that example, and why it's such an effective way to kind of show the power of InterSystems IRIS?

Jenny Ames 10:29 Yeah, so the ESA used one of our products, which InterSystems IRIS takes the best features of that, but it was actually cool. There was a great presentation a few years ago that I got to see, and it's this thing that they put up in space and it was actually really small. And you could…you can't see me right now, but it's, you know, maybe the size of, I think it was like a soccer ball almost, or maybe even a little smaller than that. And it basically maps the whole galaxy and was, you know, for brightness and speed and all these different celestial objects. And then it brought that data back and allowed the operators to basically analyze the data and really map the galaxy, which is really cool. But yeah, I think that's a really neat example because it's handling a lot of data and we've been doing big data since before that that term was really coined. But really cool things when you have all the data and you're able to really make sense of it.

Derek Robinson 11:38 Right. Nice. And just as a little bit of a note to our learners as far as looking to learn more about some of these features, in general, we were just talking about both scalability and reliability. With scalability, it's sharding that you really can look at as far as learning more when it comes to scaling your systems horizontally. And I don't want to dive into it because we'll have other content on that. And for reliability, it's mirroring, right? Like I think what you mentioned with the reliability of systems, if one goes down, maybe that mirroring ability is one of the features of InterSystems products. I sometimes say IRIS, but we're talking about really most of our technology stack that are really fundamental to some of those scalability and reliability features. So kind of moving into the last portion here, which is, we kind of punted on healthcare because we wanted to say "Don't drop InterSystems directly into a healthcare bucket without, you know, doing more research on it and kind of understanding what's available." But let's say you are in the healthcare space. InterSystems IRIS for Health is the healthcare extension of InterSystems IRIS, a more robust platform. Tell us about some of the extended functionality that's specific to healthcare with InterSystems IRIS for Health.

Jenny Ames 12:46 Yeah. So IRIS for Health is that it's InterSystems IRIS, but it's really built for the healthcare environment, so it has a bunch of prebuilt things that help you to integrate and really build an entire application for the healthcare environment. So it includes prebuilt support for things like HL7 v2, so you can bring in different messages based on events. We have support for FHIR. There's even a built-in FHIR resource repository to manage all the resources. If you're not familiar with those terms, you can Google it and learn about it. We actually have some courses on it as well that you can take. We have support for IHE, so many of our healthcare formats. And so that's built in, and it basically makes it a lot easier to build your integrations and your application a lot faster because of those prebuilt things.

Derek Robinson 13:45 Right. Nice. And just a quick little plug there is that that learning content, Jenny referred to, learning.intersystems.com, is where our learning catalog is. I think that's in kind of the intro of these podcasts and everything. But speaking of kind of learning more and calling to action, the last thing we want to talk about here, we've been talking about InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems products as a whole. If some of our listeners are curious and they want to learn more about it, how can people try IRIS?

Jenny Ames 14:08 Yeah. We have two great new things that are available. There is the Try IRIS instance. It's basically a trial instance that you can get hands-on for free, and it's available for 24 hours if you don't register. But if you register, you can keep it around for 30 days, which is really cool. You get hands-on, there's some prebuilt samples built into that. So to access that, you can go to intersystems.com/try, and there's a button on the right where you can start coding. And then there's another site that's actually related to that. So on the left-hand side of that screen as well, there's our new button to get to our new Getting Started site. So if you go to gettingstarted.intersystems.com, you can go directly there and again, there's exercises and some use-case videos, so you can start to imagine different ways of using InterSystems IRIS.

Derek Robinson 14:57 Nice, nice. And for our listeners, we'll put those links in the episode description so that you can go straight to those, whether it's the Try page or the Getting Started page, to really learn more about InterSystems IRIS. So Jenny Ames, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll talk to you soon!

Jenny Ames   Great. Thanks for having me!

Derek Robinson 15:16 So thanks again to Jenny for joining us in having a really, I think, informative conversation about InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health a little bit at the end there as well, about really some of the biggest impacts that it can make for developers building these applications that might be very data intensive, they might require interoperability with other systems, transforming data that you're sending or receiving between other applications. Having an ultra-reliable setup that can really be depended on if something goes down, or if you need to scale it a lot more than you currently have it. So a good discussion with Jenny about InterSystems IRIS, and thanks again to her. Like I mentioned in the intro, we have two other episodes available for you in the catalog that you can listen to right now, and then as we go forward, as we mentioned in the trailer, we're going to be looking to do one to two episodes a month, and really as much as we can churn out content to you from our experts, that's the plan for us to be able to give you informative and intriguing discussions to make you want to learn more. So like Jenny mentioned, you can try out InterSystems IRIS by going to intersystems.com/try or gettingstarted.intersystems.com, and as far as generic learning content, head over to learning.intersystems.com to see our full catalog and again, search for Data Points on your favorite podcast app and hit that subscribe button. That way you'll get every new episode every time we have one. So thanks again for listening, and we'll see you guys next time on Data Points.