Michael Leone on Wed, 9 Apr 2003 14:26:09 -0400 |
Chris Hedemark said: > 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 I'm thinking .. if it was that simple, someone would have done it years ago. He mentions $400 for a copy of such information. > 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. And keep giving it to him as periodic updates, if he wants valid data. Quarterly? Semi-annually? > 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 It sure sounds like he wants all land deed/records available to anyone who wants to look them up. Ordinarily, I would think that would mean the whole database. Less any fields that should not be made public (office use only, etc), if they haven't already done that. The part I don't get is that his article mentions "the equivalent of 3 floppy disks worth of information". Is that right - 4M is the whole publicly-accessible database of land ownership records? That would seem like a very small database of properties, or very little information about a larger number of properties. And Philly has a lot of properties - it is, after all, still the 6th largest city in the nation. Is that just a subset? Is that just the name of the current property owner? No description of property, no current appraisal info, no transaction history, etc? And if it's really only 4M, just burn a CD. :-) But since that's not an option, I presume there must be more to it than that. > 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. That might overcome a technical consideration, and possibly a license/cost limitation. There's also (re)training of current staff to the new database environment, don't forget. I'll guarentee the city won't forget that little item. :-) Not to mention support contracts with somebody, to fix it when it breaks in a major way. -- PGP Fingerprint: 0AA8 DC47 CB63 AE3F C739 6BF9 9AB4 1EF6 5AA5 BCDF Member, LEAF Project <http://leaf.sourceforge.net> AIM: MikeLeone Public Key - <http://www.mike-leone.com/~turgon/turgon-public-key.asc> Registered Linux user# 201348 _________________________________________________________________________ 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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