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@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