Replies to post #38149 on The Question and Answer Board (IHUB)

[TonyMcFadden]

If you don't know the cause of the failure, how can you possibly say this?

"Why do we need to use kid gloves to sugarcoat an episode which should never have happened?"

Of course, if it turns out that someone spilled cheery coke on a server, then fine, you are justified.

[IH Geek [Dave]]

I hope that SI is economically viable because I am sure that the technology must exist to prevent this.

It does, but conversion takes time. SI is still running on the Sun/Oracle platform that Go2Net and Infospace moved it to. Bob is in the process of rewriting the UI in ASP.net and converting the DB to SQL Server. It was actually a process that was prepping some of the data (deleting some records) that precipitated the crash.

SI has a massive amount of data, with over 20 million messages and hundreds of thousands of registered users, on a platform that would make the gods of confusion smirk. When it goes astray this severely, it takes some time to get it back. If this had somehow happened in SQL Server, it undoubtedly would have been back on line within minutes.