Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Monitoring Database Reaches Limit, Quits Tracking Felons and Parolees

Posted by timothy on from the paid-by-the-row dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of US sex offenders, prisoners on parole and other convicts were left unmonitored after an electronic tagging system shut down because of data overload. BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold — more than two billion records — on Tuesday. This left authorities across 49 states unaware of offenders' movement for about 12 hours." As the astonished submitter asks, "2 billion records?"

4 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. 2 billion... by onion2k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Assuming that's a normal "US" billion, and assuming it's a journal of historical data going back a few years, I don't think it's unreasonable to think there could be information in there on a couple of hundred thousand people each of whom has been track for an average of at least 6 months. So, approximately and with some guesses, that's around 55 records per prisoner per day. 1 update every 30 minutes? That sounds about right, maybe a little on the low side if anything.

    What is surprising is that they were running some sort of database process that maxxed out at 2 billion records, and that it just stopped once it hit that limit rather than failing over to a backup process. But then, this is a government IT contract, so maybe it's not too surprising.

    --
    http://twitter.com/onion2k
    1. Re:2 billion... by Statecraftsman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you track 16000 people and store their location once per second, you'll only need 1.55 days to reach 2^31 records. Once per minute only gives you 90 days. Once every 10 minutes, less than 3 years... I wonder if anyone is on the user end of this system that can comment.

  2. about 16000 by roman_mir · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Prisons and other corrections agencies were blocked from getting notifications on about 16,000 people, BI Incorporated spokesman Jock Waldo said on Wednesday.

    - interesting number. Anyway, it's not about the number of people in the database, it's about some number of records associated with each person presenting their location, so probably GPS coordinates taken at some time intervals.

    Also note that they are still logging the data, they just can't read it, so it's an application for displaying the coordinates that is failing. Quite possible that the actual problem is in filtering the data, maybe they are just trying to view data for an entire time period per person rather than looking at latest records, something like: 'last month only'. But this is, in the words of infamous W, 'speculaaation'.

    --
    You can't handle the truth.
  3. 32 bit signed integer strikes again by Co0Ps · · Score: 4, Interesting

    2 billion? That's awkwardly close to 2147483647... This is why your ID field should be BIGINT and not INT.... They where probably logging coordinates etc.