Need a US visa, passport? Prepare for misery: Database crash strands thousands An unspecified glitch in a global database used by the US government to issue passports and travel visas has left countless people around the world unable to travel for the last few days, according to State Department officials. "The Bureau of Consular Affairs has been experiencing technical problems with our passport and visa …
"The Bureau of Consular Affairs has been experiencing technical problems with our passport and visa system," Marie Harf, deputy spokesperson for the State Department, said in a press briefing on Thursday. "The issue is worldwide, not specific to any particular country."
If Marie opens her mouth, she is saying something between a half-truth and an outright lie with probability close to 1.
Though I cannot fathom what she is trying to retruthify here.
big oracle DB, one company I was at a long time ago their largest OLTP oracle instance at the time I left (I'm sure it grew a bunch after that) was about 60TB. Oracle told them at the time it was by far the largest single OLTP in the world(next biggest was apparently Amazon at well under 10TB for a single instance). It consumed that much space due to bad application design not because they were doing trillions of transactions.
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" It consumed that much space due to bad application design not because they were doing trillions of transactions."
I worked on a database like that. The I.T. director liked the salesman and co-opted him into the design process. I ended up with what was allegedly the worlds biggest Progress database cluster. It had sixty databases when it should only have needed 2 or 3.
My how we laughed. It did run nicely but had the odd glitch and really did not like doing command line dumps etc. All run on NT4 on a DEC Alpha, one of the most stable Windows platforms I have ever seen.
>> All run on NT4 on a DEC Alpha, one of the most stable Windows platforms I have ever seen.
Run that kit. Was stable but had memory leaks that would embarrass a politician. Was NT4 after all. But I digress. How often in IT do we find that staff who have done studies in the technology, worked competently in it for years are over-ridden by some suit with not a technical clue for non-IT reasons ?
100 million is peanuts granted there will be dozens of child tables will shed loads of related info. Your average financial trading DB will house dozens of tables with in excess of a 500 million records easily. Largest I've seen in Oracle was a financial pricing DB, 3 tables had just tipped the billion mark each.
Of course like most databases, it's not size that counts it efficiency and fitness for purpose. No good having a DB and then not being able to get stuff out of it in a timely fashion or at all in the US Gov's case at the moment!
This is what "five nines" of reliability looks like.
The next time a salesman tries to tell you only the big established players can serve the needs of "enterprise" customers, remember this. Note that the claimed total downtime per century is likely to happen in the first year. And then again in the second year. And so on.
With the downtime so far, this is "two nines" reliability at best.
Some real pros at work here then. Planed db maintenance should always be validated by a run on a test base and implementation must always have a solid back-out plan which gets executed as soon as the maintenance/upgrade looks likely to exceed the recovery window start point. That's planned maintenance the old fashioned way. Rank amateurs IMHO.
I'm pretty sure it accounts for 95% of cock ups whether IT or Admin.
Basically the working population in the West doesn't give a crap about their jobs anymore.
They've all been kicked in the nuts or ovaries so many times by those at the top they don't don't give a sh*t.
If they see a major issue or bug on the horizon do they dutifully get up and report it? Nope, sod it, who cares, let it happen! Maybe our boss will get the sack and we'll get a new douchebag in his place. He/she might be less of a douche so it might work out okay!
To quote Office Space -
"It's not that I'm lazy....it's that I just don't care!"
If you are a Boss, think long and hard about what you have done to make staff 'want to take a bullet' for you or the company over the past few years. Yep...thats why they all keep coming in later and later with longer and longer faces.
The US of A - world's technology leader ... ONLY on their minds.
I have a friend whose passport is filled and he needs extra pages to be able to exit this country in order to get home to his child who had an accident. But the US Consulate just gave him a number and told him to check their web site.
Made a special trip outside the US to renew my US visa (because for whatever reason even when the paperwork is approved you still have to leave their border to get the stamp) and had my Consulate interview last week.
So the US Embassy now has my passport and because they're totally opaque and unaccountable I don't know if I'll be able to travel as planned or stuck here (with my daughter) racking up unexpected bills and - despite being a tax payer there you're not really wanted or represented - no-one seems to be doing a good job of caring or communicating. Starting to wonder if they know how to update their website to add a status notification...
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