> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database "because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money.
This is the worst kind of graft and should result in criminal charges. The software development industry is still in a nascent stage and our tools are great but professional standards are still undeveloped.
> Technology is often seen as the problem, he said, but he generally found that the problems were due to using obsolete technology and a lack of knowledge about the data being handled. There is often no documentation of the data and its structure, coupled with no understanding of that by the people in charge of it. Poor leadership in the agencies is another barrier; there needs to be a champion for a change of this sort, who understands what needs to be done and properly assigns people to work on it.
> storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money.
Given that they’re not disputing that it was being stored that many times, then it’s plausible the vendor was using replication as their error recovery strategy which isn’t an invalid choice. Erasure coding is a more difficult alternative to implement. This is too short a sentence with too little detail to draw any actual conclusion from. Heck, maybe the software even had a configuration option but there was no in-house expertise to configure it properly.
This is the worst kind of graft and should result in criminal charges. The software development industry is still in a nascent stage and our tools are great but professional standards are still undeveloped.
> Technology is often seen as the problem, he said, but he generally found that the problems were due to using obsolete technology and a lack of knowledge about the data being handled. There is often no documentation of the data and its structure, coupled with no understanding of that by the people in charge of it. Poor leadership in the agencies is another barrier; there needs to be a champion for a change of this sort, who understands what needs to be done and properly assigns people to work on it.
Oh. Well. Precisely.