Re: TIDE, Railhead, and Oracle

Interesting to me that you propose that. Here in the UK we have the same idea - government gets to store our biological identities in at least 2 databases - I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. I certainly don't wish to trade it for faster check in. Especially as no-one wants to use the same tech for better health care. Still if you want every border guard and cop to have access to core identity data for legal citizens, I imagine that faster airports will be only one advantage.

On 08/09/2008, David Barbour <david.barbour1_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l