TIDE, Railhead, and Oracle

From: Bill Ferguson <wbfergus_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2008 07:09:47 -0600
Message-ID: <4025610e0809070609hd2f076ck3831f84f7717c142@mail.gmail.com>


I sure hope nobody on this list is working on these projects. This was just forwarded to me by my Project Chief.

Apparently the House Science and Technology Committee finds SQL lacking. Laying off 800 contractors? - be careful who you hire. Good thing it only cost half a billion dollars.
It's the 4th story down here.
http://news.cnet.com/the-iconoclast/?categoryId=9756918

Sounds like it was originally written in Oracle/XML. Railhead team wanted to convert it into Oracle proper. It cannot do Boolean keyword searches? http://mobile.eweek.com/device/html_article.php?id=1&CALL_URL=http%3A%2F%2Fw ww.eweek.com%2Fc%2Fa%2FGovernment-IT%2FKey-US-Terrorist-Database-Program-Mir ed-in-Controversy%2F

Poor oversite to blame in this article. 463 tables, 295 of which are undocumented.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=995

<rant on>
If anybody on here is on either of these two projects, use Oracle Text for the searches. Send me an email and I'll send you a Word document I created for my Project Chief that shows how I created a little (3200 line) PL/SQL program to loop through each table gathering all the info for each 'parent' record and write this into a CLOB field in XML format. I also have triggers on all my tables so every time a record is added or modified, the XML/CLOB field gets ceated/updated, and then all searches get performed against that XML/CLOB field with Oracle Text. After setup (which took several days on my database), the searches are done in a matter of seconds. I have it designed for a simple Google-type search, or you can even specify which fields (XML 'tags') to search within.

It ain't that dang hard! Why can't I get one of those jobs? Oh yeah, I'm already in the government. Maybe I can use these articles to justify a promotion?

</rant off>

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Received on Sun Sep 07 2008 - 08:09:47 CDT

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