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?"

Well no wonder

[Fry-kun]

MS Access can't possibly handle 2 billion records, no matter how much hardware you throw at it.

Thereby solving the problem...

[Adambomb]

BI increased its data storage capacity to avoid a repeat of the problem.

ONCE AND FOR ALL.

Re:Well no wonder

[sakdoctor]

65536 Excel rows should be enough for anyone

CSV To The Rescue!

[WidgetGuy]

The actual data was only about 500K. The rest was XML markup.

Re:1 in 31 US Citizens in custody or parole

[ieatcookies]

No no it's fine, they're all being monitored. Oh wait....

Re:Now..

[Sulphur]

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2010 10:31:23 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [e-mail] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

Re:two billion locations perhaps?

[NNKK]

2 billion offenders tracked should be fine, as there are only about 300 million people in the US. But 2 billion locations? Someone needs a real database. Or a chron job to archive these puppies.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you think it's spelled "chron", you probably shouldn't be making suggestions on this subject.

Re:Now..

[Mitchell314]

No, what you're supposed to do is to have each movement have its own column.

Re:Now..

[Phat_Tony]

But this just tracks US sex offenders.

It will be no time before the fear mongers on the evening news are bandying about the new statistic,
600% of the population of the US are sex offenders.

Re:Now..

[jesset77]

Each movement should be a row in a child table.

You're not designing for availability. Each movement should get it's own child table. Each hosted on a separate machine. Geographically distributed, ideally each on different continents.

Granted you might run out of continents, but if you can't just buy more then you probably can't afford my consulting fees, either. Next!