With InterSystems IRIS you can:
- Build quickly – Create and deploy applications without spending time integrating separate databases, messaging, and analytics engines.
- Handle any data – Work with relational, object, document, and multidimensional data in one place.
- Connect systems – Use built-in interoperability to integrate with APIs, services, and external data sources.
- Scale with confidence – Support high-volume transaction processing and analytics workloads without switching platforms.
Key Features
At its core, InterSystems IRIS® is a high-performance, multi-model database engine designed for both transactional and analytical workloads. Its architecture allows applications to scale without compromising on speed or efficiency.
IRIS Speed Test Demo
Run side-by-side benchmarks with PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server to compare performance and resource usage under identical workloads.
Performance and Scalability Benchmark Report:
IRIS supports multi-model access to a single copy of your data — as relational tables, objects, key-value pairs, documents (JSON), or multidimensional arrays — all without replication or abstraction layers. You can use whichever model fits your task, even in parallel.
Native Multidimensional Arrays
Data is stored natively as efficient multidimensional arrays, and you can access or manipulate it directly — no setup required for structures, declarations, or allocations.
Object Access
IRIS offers a standards-based object model (ODMG), with features like multiple inheritance. You can work directly with objects using ObjectScript or Python, or expose classes to Java, .NET, JavaScript, and more. IRIS also supports automatic JSON and XML projections.
SQL Access
InterSystems IRIS treats SQL as a first-class interface. You can use standard SQL for querying — either natively or via ODBC/JDBC (a Java-based driver is included). The Relational Gateway also lets you access data from external SQL databases.
Thanks to its internal architecture, queries typically run faster than on traditional databases — even on real-time transactional data. IRIS supports standard indexes as well as bitmap and bit-slice indexes, is optimized for high-throughput and concurrent workloads, and uses parallel execution with memory-efficient query plans.
InterSystems IRIS brings AI and advanced analytics directly to your operational data, so you can build intelligent applications without moving data into a separate stack.
- Adaptive Analytics: Semantic layer + workload-aware acceleration for BI
- IntegratedML: Train and run ML models with just a few SQL-like statements
- Vector Search: Native vector datatype and similarity search, plus built-in support for RAG/orchestration to power semantic search and generative AI apps.
- Embedded BI & Text Search: Model-driven cubes/dashboards you can embed, and fast SQL Text Search (with %iFind/SQL Search indexes) for unstructured text.
All tools run close to the data and integrate into applications with minimal overhead.
Vertical Scaling
IRIS takes advantage of modern multi-core machines with parallel SQL and memory-efficient execution.
Horizontal Scaling
- Data Sharding: Split large datasets across nodes for parallel processing
- Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP): Scale read throughput by caching data on app servers
- Combine both for large datasets and high user concurrency
Sharding and ECP can be used simultaneously, so your applications can handle both large volumes of data and a large number of users, scaling for both dimensions independently.
Video:
Big Data in InterSystems IRIS [4 min]
InterSystems IRIS harvest and handle vast amounts of data. It has options to address big data challenges, including the InterSystems IRIS Spark connector, built-in sharding, and machine learning tools.
Setup & Tools
Use the Tools You Already Know
InterSystems IRIS works well with open-source tools and frameworks:
- Native development in Python, Node.js, Java, .NET
- Integration with Apache Spark
- Compatible with VS Code and Jupyter Notebooks
- Connectivity via REST, JDBC, ODBC, and more
Installation Options
InterSystems IRIS Community Edition direct installation with full IDE integration support.
1. Download kit ⬇️
2. You'll need an InterSystems SSO to log in and download. Click "Register for a new account" to sign up if you don’t have one yet.
InterSystems IRIS Community Edition comes with a free license and a few limitations, and is ideal for evaluation and testing.
Quick setup with containerized InterSystems IRIS Community Edition instance.
1. Install Docker: proceed to the official Docker site and follow its guidelines to install Docker in your system
2. Download example application (the app contain basic code to dockerize the InterSystems IRIS instance) or directly from Docker Hub.
Get up and running with a cloud deployment of InterSystems IRIS Community Edition.
All major cloud providers are supported. Check our
Cloud Partners page for more information.
Get InterSystems IRIS Community Edition at one of the cloud partners:
🔗
InterSystems IRIS on AWS Marketplace
🔗
InterSystems IRIS on Azure
Documentation on deploying InterSystems IRIS to the cloud.
Deployment Environment
Visual Studio Code + ObjectScript
Recommended IDE setup with InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack
1. Download and install
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
2. Proceed to the extensions tab and install
InterSystems ObjectScript Extension Pack
Article: How to start Using VsCode
Documentation on Visual Studio Code
📝Check out the article ‘ How to Get InterSystems IRIS Community Edition’ on our Developer Community for a step-by-step walkthrough.
