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@xxxxxxxxx> 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 > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > >