Re: How many names and addresses can you have for ID card
- From: MM <kylix_is@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:08:17 +0100
On Mon, 03 Apr 2006 20:40:29 GMT, axel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
In uk.legal Dan Holdsworth <dan1701usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 1 Apr 2006 11:19:09 -0800, Turk182
<digitalradiouk@xxxxxxx>
was popularly supposed to have said:
In the early years of the Poll Tax, back when Thatcher was testing it in
Scotland, a wheeze someone discovered was to change addresses more than
a certain number of times.
This then overflowed the area of the database that had been allocated to
store such data, and caused the system to fail to accept the input.
That forced the tax claim onto a paperwork-only track, which since the
whole system was under-staffed and under-resourced effectively stalled
it indefinitely.
This should not work these days, since any fairly savvy programmer would
simply assign the fields that are likely to grow massively a fairly
large amount of database space, say 2 megabytes compressed. Under Oracle
(the only database I am knowledgable enough about to comment on)
anything over 255 characters long becomes a Large Object, in this case a
Character Large Object (CLOB).
Modern Oracle systems allow for searching of, but not indexing of CLOBs
so the system handles the search by opening each in memory in turn and
searching through it. Searching CLOBs is thus memory and CPU-intensive,
so if you want to be a pain to the people, get you and a large number of
other people to choose some very similar aliases and names which are
long but differ ever so slightly, and insist on never handing over your
ID card number.
What makes you think that a standard relational DBS model a la
Oracle would be used?
In fact it would be *totally* the wrong kind of approach to use.
A directory system a la LDAP or X.500 would be a much more natural
approach.
This allows records to be added to an entry, but in such a way that
endless variations or alternatives of the same type of information
can be added.
For example instead of having a field as might exist in a relational
DBS for an email address, there will be an attribute of type 'email'.
But there is no need for a particular amount of space to be reserved
for 'email'. An entry may have any number of atrributes which are
of type email, be it zero, ten or a hundred. If someone acquires
another ten email addresses, they are simply added to his entry as
a trivial operation.
The same applies to any other type of attribute... name, address,
telephone number.
This is why many organisations use a directory to organise contact
information about their employees instead of a relational DBS...
there is far more flexibility.
See! Two people (Dan, Alex) who know something of what they're talking
about. But imagine the Home Office, trying to understand the
gobbledegook about the right kind of database, OS, platform, etc, from
several vendors, all vying for a piece of the enormous taxpayer pie!
MM
.
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