A connection to InterSystems IRIS or Caché needs five values to work and offers a handful of options that decide how much of the server you see. This is the field-by-field reference for that dialogue.
Create the connection
In the Server Navigator, right-click the Connections node and choose Add Server.
The connection properties dialogue opens.
Field reference
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Server name | The name for the connection as it appears in the tree. |
| IP address | The IP address or DNS name of the server the database runs on. |
| Port | The TCP/IP port used by the IRIS or Caché server. The default for Caché is 1972; IRIS instances commonly use 1972 as well, but check the instance if it was installed alongside others. |
| Driver version | Choose a bundled driver from the same release as your server, or newer. |
| Namespace | The default namespace to open. |
| Don’t query for namespace list | Set this if your login does not have permission to query the namespace list. |
| Show system namespaces | Show system namespaces such as %SYS in the Server Navigator. |
| Show system objects | Show system objects such as the %Library schema in the Server Navigator. |
| Query remote namespace | Show remote namespaces in the Server Navigator. |
| Check namespace availability | Test whether remote namespaces are actually reachable before listing them as available. |
| Login name | The username used to log in. By default this is _SYSTEM, and it is not case sensitive. |
| Password | The password for that account. For _SYSTEM the default is SYS, and it is case sensitive. |
Notes on the options
The namespace is usually optional. SQL DATA LENS reads the list of namespaces from the server and shows all of them, so you rarely need to name one. That query runs against the %SYS database and therefore needs a login with the rights to read it. Where the login does not have those rights, set Don’t query for namespace list and enter the namespace you want to work in.
Leave Show system objects off to begin with. IRIS and Caché ship a large number of system classes and schemas, and a tree that lists all of them is hard to work in. See hiding the system objects for the before and after.
Check namespace availability costs a round trip per remote namespace. It is worth having on when you are diagnosing why a mapped namespace does not respond, and worth turning off on a server with many remote namespaces where you only care about a few. Working with namespaces explains what the tree shows for each type.
Pick the driver deliberately. A driver older than the server is the most common cause of odd metadata behaviour, and the bundled set covers Caché 2018.1 through the current IRIS releases. The class viewer and the rest of the IRIS-specific views depend on the driver being able to read the server’s metadata.
If you already have the same instance set up as an ODBC data source, the values map straight across — see reusing Caché ODBC settings for JDBC. Locally registered instances can be imported wholesale; see importing IRIS or Caché connections.
The current build with all bundled drivers is on the download page.