On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Rick Ricky <ricks12345@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The Defense Travel System (DTS) is attempting to move to database > independence. Last I read a few years ago they spent $600 million on this > application up to that point. I'm sure its alot higher now. Probably close > to $1 billion or more. It basically handles all of the commercial travel for > the US Department of Defense (over 3 million users). They have over 2 TBs of > data. They did not design for archiving so it will grow indefinitely. > doesn't tally with the figures in the google search you quoted - either for total cost or for percentage of travel going through it. eg http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1106/111606p1.htm cost < $500m and < 20% of the travel going through it. > > They are currently working on a "technical refresh" (supposedly that is > their PR word for "pay us to write this piece of junk software again"). They > wrote their new modules against a mySQL database using an outsourced > sub-contracting company(which made money even though this failed > completely. I think the company is Dovel. Not sure. Might be IDC). They > wanted to prove they could make the application database independent. They > used a tool called Hybernate to generate all their queries. Probably spent > millions of dollars on this re-write of the code. > I expect you'll find that's hibernate... http://www.hibernate.org/ > > They deployed it to production 2 weeks ago and it was so bad that the > whole system was down for 3.5 days. This means EVERY person who works for > the department of defense could not book commercial travel > or get reimbursed or book hotels or get reimbursed for taxis or meals, or > CHANGE FLIGHTS if they were overseas for 3.5 days. They had to back out the > changes. It totally failed. Now since this is a time and material > contract(they make more money if they screw up), they are getting paid more > money to fix it. > > They do not have any code built into their application to let them detect > where the performance problems may be. Its so pathetic I have been told > their DBAs laugh at the rest of the team in their meetings. More of my tax > money down in flames. They already paid for the oracle licenses. Migrating 2 > TBs of data that is GROWING to another database is so unlikely it is > laughable. Yet the DoD got sold on database independence. They are not > allowed to use ANY oracle features. It would mean days of down time just to > move the data to the new database and this is before even testing it. That > is not going to happen. The data model has no normalization or primary keys > at all (they ignore their DBAs). > Well that doesn't sound like a bad tech decision, but unprofessional behaviour all round - I'd be sorely tempted to fire any of my team who laughed at their work colleagues in team meetings, for example. In fact it mostly seems to me to be a "why did you start when there are travel agents already" type question. -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info