Re: TIDE, Railhead, and Oracle

I've no idea why this could possibly be allowed to happen. Coming back through Immigration from a recent scuba diving trip, I marveled at the total inefficiency of the passport control process. Why (I thought) for US passport holders couldn't we just walk up to a kiosk, swipe or scan our passports and have some type of visual recognition software match our mug with the photo on file?

I guess if they can't manage 500,000 names, they couldn't possibly do anything this horribly complex.

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Bill Ferguson <wbfergus_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> 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>
>
> --
> -- Bill Ferguson
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
>

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