IRIS Image Reducer

Important: IRIS Image Reducer is an independent third-party project and is not developed, endorsed, or supported by InterSystems.
This project provides tooling that helps automate the manual process of disabling components within the official InterSystems IRIS® image.
Users are responsible for ensuring compliance with the InterSystems IRIS license agreement and any redistribution restrictions.
IRIS Image Reducer is provided as-is, without any warranties or supportability guarantees from InterSystems.

IRIS Image Reducer is a lightweight, minimal InterSystems IRIS® container image designed for scenarios where IRIS is used primarily as a high-performance SQL database engine, without additional platform components that may add size or overhead.

IRIS Image Reducer starts from the official vanilla InterSystems IRIS Docker image and programmatically disables and removes optional functionality that is not required for core SQL operations.
The result is a significantly smaller, faster-to-deploy, minimal IRIS image, ideal for:

Microservices
CI/CD pipelines
Automated testing
Cloud-native database workloads
Python / SQL / AI / ML pipelines
Projects relying on SQLAlchemy-IRIS, JDBC, ODBC, or direct SQL access

Image size comparison:

Image Type	Approx Size
Vanilla IRIS	~3.5 GB
Reduced image	~580 MB

✨ Key Features

🚀 Much smaller Docker image size
Most optional IRIS components are removed.
🧩 Pure SQL-focused IRIS runtime
Ideal for lightweight data engines and modern application stacks.
🔌 JDBC, ODBC, and SQLAlchemy-IRIS fully supported
All client SQL interfaces continue to work as expected.
🧱 Based on official IRIS vanilla image
Fully compatible with InterSystems licensing, environment variables, and standard tooling.
🛠️ Deterministic image build
The build process removes components reliably and reproducibly.

🗂️ What’s Removed

IRIS Image Reducer strips out components that are often unused in minimal deployments, including:

Interoperability / Ensemble components
(Production engine, Business Services, Adapters, etc.)
DeepSee / BI stack
Full Web Stack
- Management Portal
- Web Gateway
- CSP
- REST framework
- Web server modules
Most non-SQL runtime components
Other optional development libraries and tools

This ensures the resulting container includes only what is needed to run IRIS as a SQL database engine.

🟢 What’s Kept

IRIS Image Reducer preserves only the essential pieces:

Core IRIS database engine
SQL engine & query processor
System classes required for storage and globals
Authentication needed for basic operation
JDBC & ODBC connectivity
Compatibility with:
- SQLAlchemy-IRIS
- dbt-iris
- Liquibase-IRIS
- typeorm-iris
- Any app using IRIS purely through SQL

Everything else is removed to reduce footprint.

📦 Usage

Pull (once published)

docker pull caretdev/iris-community-light:latest-em

Run

docker run -d \
  --name iris-light \
  -p 1972:1972 \
  caretdev/iris-community-light:latest-em

Connect via JDBC

String url = "jdbc:IRIS://localhost:1972/USER";

Connect via SQLAlchemy-IRIS

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
engine = create_engine("iris://_system:SYS@localhost:1972/USER")

🏗️ Building Your Own IRIS Image Reducer Image

IRIS Image Reducer can be generated from any official InterSystems IRIS base image, including:

Enterprise IRIS (containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris:...)
Community Edition (containers.intersystems.com/intersystems/iris-community:...)
Any other vanilla IRIS image that follows the standard structure

The project includes a convenient build script make.sh that takes:

Base IRIS image (vanilla IRIS, Enterprise or Community)
Name of the resulting lightweight IRIS image

🛠️ How It Works

IRIS Image Reducer uses the official InterSystems IRIS image as the base and applies a reduction script that:

Identifies removable components (web, interoperability, DeepSee, others).
Deletes binaries, libraries, classes, and system modules not required for SQL.
Adjusts permissions and cleans up leftover metadata.
Produces a lightweight image with full SQL compatibility.

The project does not modify the IRIS kernel or SQL subsystem, ensuring compatibility with InterSystems’ supported APIs.

🧪 Testing & Validation

IRIS Image Reducer has been verified with:

SQLAlchemy-IRIS
Basic SQL workloads
JDBC applications
Containerized development environments
Automated CI pipelines

You can extend the included test scripts or integrate IRIS Image Reducer into your own tooling.

⚠️ Notes & Limitations

Management Portal and all web-based functionality are not available.
Interoperability/Ensemble-based apps will not run.
DeepSee/Analytics dashboards are removed.
Licensing works same as upstream IRIS image.

📜 License

This project provides scripts and tooling to modify the official IRIS image.
You are responsible for complying with the InterSystems IRIS license agreement and any redistribution rules.

iris-image-reducer