A quarter of all government databases are illegal and should be scrapped or redesigned, a report has claimed. The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust says storing information leads to vulnerable people, such as young black men, single parents and children, being victimised.
Lucas123 writes “In what could be the start of a national health information exchange system, the Social Security Administration became the first federal agency to go live with a public-private electronic health records information exchange that will cut wait time for 2.6 million Americans who apply for benefits each year by weeks or months. The electronic exchange runs on a database operated by a non-profit organization in Virginia and open-source software deployed at the Social Security Administration. ‘The goal of the NHIN effort is to enable secure access to health care data and real-time information sharing among physicians, patients, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and federal agencies … regardless of location or the applications that are being used.'”
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One in four Government databases are illegal under human rights or data protection and should be scrapped immediately, a panel of experts have warned.
Because I use auto-increment integers in almost every table I can for the primary key, they tend to get very large very fast. This can sometimes be an annoying problem when I’m debugging an application or testing a mysql database query. They are resetable and it’s so much quicker to select from the database when you’re checking for id=3 or id=25 then id=305678.
The query to reset the auto increment primary id of your choosing is :
ALTER TABLE some_table AUTO_INCREMENT = 1;
It is also possible to set the next auto_increment number
You can do it like this :
SET insert_id=5;
Now your next mysql_insert_id() will be 5.
IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes.
Jani Pirkola writes to tell us that Green Phosphor’s new project “Glasshouse” allows users to take database queries or spreadsheets and create 3D representations in a virtual world. Man what I wouldn’t give to mash my level 80 death knight up with some of the ugly joins I have run across in the past. “Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively – all from within a virtual world. Glasshouse produces graphs which are avatars of the data itself. We’ve tailored the system for the use of biotech companies, specifically for drug discovery and development. Dr. David Resuehr, a molecular biologist, recently joined Green Phosphor as our Chief Scientist.”
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There are several ways to backup MySQL data. In this article we’ll look at how to backup your databases using different methods, we will also learn how to achieve an automatic backup solution to make the process easier.
krou writes “The National Security Archive at George Washington University has awarded its 2009 Rosemary Award to the FBI for worst freedom of information performance (PDF of the award). Previous winners have been the CIA and the Treasury. The NSA notes that ‘The FBI’s reports to Congress show that the Bureau is unable to find any records in response to two-thirds of its incoming FOIA requests on average over the past four years, when the other major government agencies averaged only a 13% “no records” response to public requests.’ The FBI’s explanation, according to the NSA, is that ‘files are indexed only by reference terms that have to be manually applied by individual agents,’ and even then, ‘agents don’t always index all relevant terms.’ Furthermore, ‘unless a requester specifically asks for a broader search, the FBI will only look in a central database of electronic file names at FBI headquarters in Washington.’ Any search will therefore ‘miss any internal or cross-references to people who are not the subject of an investigation, any records stored at other FBI offices around the country, and any records created before 1970.'”
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The Guardian just launched a new API which will allow third-party developers to access and reuse the Guardian’s content database in their own applications.
stoolpigeon writes “My past as a DBA probably makes me a bit biased, but the reaction I’ve seen the most when a database application isn’t performing as well as would be liked seems to focus on the database side of things. The search for a solution usually seems to center around tuning db parameters, the building (or removal) of indexes and, if the budget allows, throwing hardware at the problem. In their new work, Refactoring SQL Applications, Faroult and L’Hermite bring a much wider range of options to the table. There is a lot in this little book for the developer charged with fixing an existing application and I think a lot of good information that could save one from making a number of headache-inducing mistakes on a new application.” Keep reading for the rest of JR’s review.
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