New in HealthShare Health Connect 2023.1
This page describes the new and enhanced features in the 2023.1 release of HealthShare® Health Connect, which is an extended maintenance (EM) release. Some of these features were also available in the continuous delivery (CD) releases since 2022.1, the previous EM release.
For a more exhaustive list of the changes included in this release, refer to the Upgrade ChecklistOpens in a new tab.
Release Information for 2023.1
The current maintenance release is 2023.1.4. The posting for 2023.1.4 is build 2023.1.4.580.0.
Enhancing Analytics and AI
Columnar Storage
Columnar Storage is a new storage option for InterSystems SQL tables. Columnar Storage offers analytical queries which are an order of magnitude faster than traditional row queries on InterSystems IRIS. Such queries typically aggregate data over very large tables and typically involve filters and groupings on one or more columns. By laying out the table data by column rather than by row (which works best for transactions on a handful of rows at a time), we can dramatically reduce the amount of I/O required to run such queries and exploit modern chipset-level optimizations called SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) to further improve performance as part of vectorized query processing.
This capability first became available in HealthShare Health Connect 2022.2 as an experimental feature. It is now fully supported for production use in 2023.1, with the exception of using columnar storage for sharded tables. Support for this combination will be delivered in a future release. Customers who used the experimental version of this capability should reload all columnar table data after upgrading to 2023.1.
For more details, see Choose an SQL Table Storage Layout.
Enhancing Speed, Scale and Security
Memory Settings
New installations of Health Connect now use smarter defaults for shared memory and lock table size settings. The new defaults apply best practice configurations based on the configured global buffer size (which, in turn, considers available system memory if not set by the user) and work well for most workloads. As before, users may still override these defaults with specific values. Existing settings are not affected.
Platform Scalability
This release includes a number of scalability enhancements that enable large production deployments to meet highly demanding workloads. These enhancements include the asynchronous reading of journal files during de-journaling and changes to the infrastructure of the Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP) which optimize resource usage and limit contention under very high load.
Platform Updates
This release adds support for the following new server platforms:
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macOS 13 (Ventura)