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US Monitoring Database Reaches Limit, Quits Tracking Felons and Parolees
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?"
MS Access can't possibly handle 2 billion records, no matter how much hardware you throw at it.
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
BI increased its data storage capacity to avoid a repeat of the problem.
ONCE AND FOR ALL.
Ice Cream has no bones.
The actual data was only about 500K. The rest was XML markup.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
Right? You shouldn't feel safe. Not because of the "criminals" but because of the reason why there are so many "criminals." Have a joint on you? You're a criminal. Do you know how many people are in jail because of simple drug-related offenses? Be afraid. http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/crime/index.html Look at that. 25% of federal inmates are in there for drug possession. I bet you a good amount of these people wouldn't rob you at gunpoint. Good luck, America!
You are now manually breathing.
it just stopped once it hit that limit rather than failing over to a backup process.
"just over 2 billion" is almost certainly 2^31 (2 147 483 648), or the maximum number representable by a signed 32-bit integer. People usually think of "over 4 billion" (2^32) as the integer limit, but that's for unsigned integers only, which are rarely used, especially in databases. I'm willing to bet that they used an "int" as a primary key in one of their tables, and simply overflowed the maximum possible value.
This kind of bug has impacted lots of systems in the past. If it happens, there's no "fail over" that could possibly save the system. The replica would have the same data, and hence the same issue, and would have failed as well. The usual fix is to extend the key type to 64-bits or longer (e.g.: GUIDs), but for a 2 billion row table, that's going to take hours at best, probably days.
Most database systems do not provide a warning when the keys start to approach large values, so it's easy to miss.
Anyone remember when Slashdot hit 16,777,215 comments, and overflowed MEDIUMINT? The ALTER TABLE statement that fixed it took hours to run. I shudder to think how long it'll take to fix this, even with the problem diagnosed.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
And you are clearly completely unaware of the accounting world.
I have yet to meet an accountant that knows much of anything about access or any other database system. On the other hand the majority of them have complained about the 65000 line limit in excel.
They ALL do this. You're telling thousands of accountants to change how they do things, and honestly, not for the better. They know how to use excel and know how to make things balance with excel.
A large portion of them took accounting because it was supposed to make them a lot of money, these people don't even use 1/10th of the functionality provided in excel, lets not try to make them learn another entirely different software skill set, ok?
Even if you're currently working in IT and are like "Oh, no, our accountants have access to all this stuff in our system and they would never do that". Trust me, they do. It all ends up in an excel sheet somewhere eventually.
Maybe the answer isn't better software, but fewer criminals to fill up the database with.
I keep seeing articles here and there how the U.S. has more people imprisoned than China. A large chunk of the prison population are inmates convicted of drug crimes and a large portion of that set of people were convicted on marijuana laws.
I don't smoke, but as a tax payer I would rather see the government make marijuana into a tax revenue generator instead of a huge expense to paid for with taxes.
Not before their incarceration, no. But after surviving lock-up in a Darwinian environment in which "fittest" equates to "most dangerous", then re-entering a society in which convicts are denied the right to a good job, there's a pretty good chance they will. We have a criminal justice system that develops criminals.
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