Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 21:06:45 -0500
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
  The online exchange was crippled, people involved with building it said=

in recent interviews, because of a huge gap between the administration=92=
s
grand hopes and the practicalities of building a website that could
function on opening day.

Vital components were never secured, including sufficient access to a dat=
a
center to prevent the website from crashing. A backup system that could g=
o
live if it did crash was not created, a weakness the administration has
never disclosed. And the architecture of the system that interacts with
the data center where information is stored is so poorly configured that
it must be redesigned, a process that experts said typically takes months=
=2E
An initial assessment identified more than 600 hardware and software
defects =97 =93the longest list anybody had ever seen,=94 one person invo=
lved
with the project said.
<...>
Another sore point was the Medicare agency=92s decision to use database
software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data
differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. CGI=

officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar.
Government officials disagreed, and its configuration remains a serious
problem.
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and-woes-before-he=
alth-website-crash.html>

NoSQL? Having just googled a bit about MarkLogic (NO RELATION!!!) and
NoSQL, this was an UTTERLY IDIOTIC choice of database systems. What I see=

talks about how it's for unstructured data... but ALL DATA for
healthcare.gov IS structured. And trying to connect to any other
government d/b, which are probably 90% at least Oracle, or MySQL, or DB/2=

(IBM).... *gah*

Plus, of course, you do *not* have a large pool of ->experienced<-
programmers (sorry, "developers") who know it to pull in for the
in-the-trenches coding....

And among the three other "pre-approved" vendors to run the show were... =

CSSC and IBM, and they picked this....

           mark