| Chris Hedemark on Wed, 9 Apr 2003 13:01:06 -0400 |
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I'd like Philadelphians to be able to look up land ownership records. To that end, I asked the City of Philadelphia to provide me with land ownership records, deeds, mortgages, etc. on CD so that I can post them on my website, Hallwatch.org. The City is not cooperating, citing cost as a reason. City laws and federal laws are different animals, but with the federal gov under the Freedom of Information Act the gummint can charge you a fee to recover their costs for looking up and duplicating the records for you. Once you have them they are public domain and you can do whatever you want with them. I would hope things could work the same way with the city but I don't have experience dealing with them. It turns out the City already has a web site that offers this information. For three years, a group of 50 private companies have been able to look at deed images and related info. at no cost, by going here: So what criteria do they use to decide which 50 private companies get access? What do you think of the Commissioner's reasoning? Sucks. If it overburdens the city's internet connection, then so be it. I think there are licensing options on Oracle for concurrent connections rather than named users, so there should be some options there too. Someone made some stupid decisions and fixing it might call into question who & why the original bad decisions were made in the first place. First, are these real obstacles. If yes, how substantial are these obstacles? What can the City do to get around them and how much would it cost? If they can provide you with a temporary read-only account to their Oracle server, and the database schema, you should be able to push that to your own machine with no problem if you're sitting on their LAN. That alleviates the internet connection concern, and I'm sure they must have some account they could allow you to use for one day to copy the data. Or ask them to do an Oracle database dump, put it on CD or tape, and you will pay reasonable costs for that search & duplication. You can download Oracle for free, long enough to populate your own DB and port it over to some other free DB of your choosing. The objections thrown in your face are speed bumps, not road blocks. I asked her recently why she didn't just ditch Oracle and use PostgreSQL or MySQL. In her defense, a lot of money was probably spent in developing that Oracle database. Changing over could be perceived as any number of politically harmful things. Porting to a new RDBMS would cost real money. Her response: "You can run free software on one little home computer, but we can't. The demands of our Dept. are too great." For the record, Hallwatch runs MySQL and Zope on an 800 Mhz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD off of a shared T-1 connection. While there are some people here who would disagree, most of the objections against PostgreSQL that I have heard are based off of flawed evaluations. Someone will just slap PostgreSQL on a random Linux box with no real system tuning or SQL tuning for that matter, and then gripe that it is too slow. You're likely to run into this sort of misinformed opinion all over the place, even by otherwise technically smart & experienced people. People just won't expend the time evaluating it like they would with Oracle or MS SQL and don't learn the caveats of that specific system. Anyway, it's moot. You just want the data, right? They can give that to you without burning an Oracle license and without burning their bandwidth. Is she correct, in your view? Would PostgreSQL or other Open Source database not be up to the job? In your opinion, what hardware configuration does this application require?
But Postgres will scale. I'm working on something in my spare time with some of the PostgreSQL developers to benchmark pgsql on different OS's & different filesystems, using some rather large publicly available tables as test data. We were kicking around the US Census TIGER database for a little bit but decided a smaller dataset would be "good enough" for what we're trying to accomplish. Unless I hear from you otherwise, I will assume that it is ok to show your comments to the Commissioner or other City officials.
Thanks for helping advance the cause of good government in the City. We really need your help! Proposal to solve your immediate problem (request for information): Ask the City to dump their database to some commonly available format. Unless it is very small, CDROM probably won't cut it. If they dump it to hard disk and you bring a computer with you with enough capacity you can copy it at LAN speed to your hard disk. Deal with porting it to postgres in your own time on your own resources. This gets around all of the objections given. Offer to pay a reasonable administrative fee for the time it takes to arrange for the dump plus the costs of copying it to portable media (if they can do this). To solve the larger problem of proprietary software in public use, that is a harder problem to solve. PostgreSQL and MySQL don't have overpaid slick salespeople driving city workers to lunch at the Four Seasons in their Mercedes SUV. They don't have the kind of marketing propaganda that Oracle has. The only way you're going to change minds is to show them concretely that it can work. Maybe if you port their schema for your own use to MySQL or better yet PostgreSQL, let them bang on it a bit, and show them that it will hold up they might *MIGHT* consider it. I dunno. The things that motivate public servants aren't always the *right* things, and the use of free software might cut off the flow of incoming perks of one sort or another from a grateful RDBMS vendor that appreciates those 6 or 7 figure annual contracts. _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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