The 2026.2 release of InterSystems IRIS® data platform, InterSystems IRIS® for Health™, and HealthShare® Health Connect is now Generally Available (GA). This is a Continuous Delivery (CD) release.
Release Highlights
- SQL and Data Management Enhancements: InterSystems SQL now supports Common Table Expressions (CTEs) in stored procedures. This release also adds SHOW PLAN ANALYZE for SQL Shell runtime metrics, improves generation and storage of vector embeddings during large data loads, and includes improvements to table partitioning, including improved ALTER TABLE ... MOVE PARTITION behavior and a fix for partition keys on fields with uppercase letters.
- Business Intelligence Enhancements: InterSystems IRIS BI can now leverage SQL foreign key relationships when defining analytical models, making it easier to model operational data that is expressed through relational structures.
- Database Operations Improvements: The cvendian utility, which is used when migrating databases between big-endian and little-endian platforms, has been optimized for faster conversion times — up to twice as fast in some cases — and improved error reporting when a conversion is interrupted.
- Interoperability UX Improvements: The new Interoperability user interface continues to mature with improvements across production configuration, Message Viewer and Message Search, Visual Trace, the DTL and BPL editors, Schema Viewer, and Rule Editor. These capabilities remain opt-in for existing customers and who are encouraged to try the new experience and provide feedback to: InteropUXFeedback@intersystems.com
- FHIR Explorer: 2026.2 introduces FHIR Explorer, a new tool for building and testing FHIR queries against IRIS for Health and third-party FHIR endpoints. It uses Capability Statements from EHR endpoints and FHIR servers to help users build complex requests, test security configurations, and discover available capabilities with IntelliSense-style suggestions.
- FHIR search, interactions, and security: FHIR server behavior has been enhanced in several areas. REST clients can now use generic application/json and application/xml headers in addition to FHIR-specific media types. Search paging with _include and _revinclude can now return included resources on the same page as their matched result, with an option to retain the previous behavior. Binary reads can return content directly when it matches the client’s Accept header. FHIR server administrators can also configure accepted OAuth Audience values for tokens issued by third-party authorization servers such as Entra ID, Okta, and Cognito. For large-scale migrations, customers can optionally bypass structural validation during ingest when alternative data-integrity controls are in place; ingestion optimizations may improve FHIR ingestion speed by 25–30% in some scenarios.
Upgrade planning note: The Apache UIMA integration, deprecated in 2023.1, has now been removed from InterSystems IRIS. Customers with older code paths that referenced UIMA should review the upgrade impact before moving to 2026.2.
Have thoughts, feedback, or edge cases we should know about? Drop them in the Developer Community — it really helps.
Documentation
Details on all the highlighted features are available through these links below:
- InterSystems IRIS 2026.2 documentation and release notes.
- InterSystems IRIS for Health 2026.2 documentation and release notes.
- Health Connect 2026.2 documentation and release notes.
Check out the upgrade impact checklist for an easily navigable overview of all changes you need to be aware of when upgrading to this release.
Download the Software
As usual for CD releases, you’ll find classic install kits for supported platforms, plus Docker-format container images.
Download classic kits from WRC: IRIS / IRIS for Health and HealthShare (Health Connect). Kits are also on Evaluation Services.
Supported platforms list: Supported Platforms
The build number for this Continuous Delivery release is 2026.2.0.217.0.
Containers are in the InterSystems Container Registry, tagged 2026.2 and latest-cd.
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