150,000 Police Records Accidentally Deleted

[the_bloke 17]

No, the police DB is obviously a mammoth thing compared to a typical 'office' sized DB. It probably has multiple read/write instances and likely is actually multiple databases that link to one another rather than it all being in one. However, the point still stands; the Police should have both a backup and a disaster recovery routine, not to mention multiple environments for development and testing. An environment should be budgeted to create or already exist if needed for disaster recovery. In simplistic terms, you restore from your last known good backup and you compare the two systems to identify what data is missing. Then you develop and test and implement a data migration to restore the missing data to live.

 

I'm also not suggesting running the diff command; by 'diff' I literally mean you run whatever script or tool you use to identify the differences between your restored data and your dataset that you know to be missing data from.

 

However this is public service IT; I wouldn't be surprised if any of the above simply isn't possible, not through a system architecture problem but a human one; a lack of planning, foresight, ability, whatever. Anyone who signs off on an IT project of national importance that seemingly can't be recovered in the event of a data loss should give up the day job.

[blackydog 40]

1 hour ago, the_bloke said:

No, the police DB is obviously a mammoth thing compared to a typical 'office' sized DB. It probably has multiple read/write instances and likely is actually multiple databases that link to one another rather than it all being in one. However, the point still stands; the Police should have both a backup and a disaster recovery routine, not to mention multiple environments for development and testing. An environment should be budgeted to create or already exist if needed for disaster recovery. In simplistic terms, you restore from your last known good backup and you compare the two systems to identify what data is missing. Then you develop and test and implement a data migration to restore the missing data to live.

 

I'm also not suggesting running the diff command; by 'diff' I literally mean you run whatever script or tool you use to identify the differences between your restored data and your dataset that you know to be missing data from.

 

However this is public service IT; I wouldn't be surprised if any of the above simply isn't possible, not through a system architecture problem but a human one; a lack of planning, foresight, ability, whatever. Anyone who signs off on an IT project of national importance that seemingly can't be recovered in the event of a data loss should give up the day job.

I would imagine it is a relational database with many parent and child tables. This shouldn't be a problem restoring and recovering as normally you would be doing it with datafiles and archivelogs to replace and update missing files.

The problem here is that it looks like someone has run a delete on a table and linked tables intentionally, albeit with hindsight incorrectly.  Even the best backup and restore strategy is going to struggle with that, especially in an OLTP database with data being changed regularly.   

Putting myself on the spot. If I was the DBA administering the database(s) I would have shut it down as soon as I found out to limit the damage, then run a flashback (providing flashback is enabled).  Of course that could have been next day and the horse is long gone, so debatable. 

As I said previously, the answer could have been replaying transactions from the application to a flashed back table (if it was only the one table maybe). 

Also just crossed my mind is data mining but you would need the relevant archivelogs IIRC, and again glad it's not me. 

 

[Mister M 1,598]

Just imagine if it were Diane Abbott who presided over 400,000 missing police files. I can only imagine the hullaballoo in the press and social media....

[blackydog 40]

6 minutes ago, Mister M said:

Just imagine if it were Diane Abbott who presided over 400,000 missing police files. I can only imagine the hullaballoo in the press and social media....

No one would be stupid enough to believe she was let loose anywhere near a database. 

[Mister M 1,598]

7 minutes ago, blackydog said:

No one would be stupid enough to believe she was let loose anywhere near a database. 

I've no doubt that she would have had the good grace to attend Parliament to answer questions on the matter, given the gravity of the situation.

But there again, having missed at least 5 COBRA meetings at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Boris Johnson can hardly admonish his Home Secretary for not demonstrating some impression that she's discharging her duties.

[ECCOnoob 1,016]

26 minutes ago, Mister M said:

Just imagine if it were Diane Abbott who presided over 400,000 missing police files. I can only imagine the hullaballoo in the press and social media....

Probably about the same as being thrown at Priti Patel.

 

There's hardly been a lack of social media interest about it. We are talking about the subject on this very thread. A quick look at Facebook and Twitter shows plenty of people playing armchair detective, second guessing what has happened, throwing in their ill-informed opinions about how it has happened and what they would do to fix it... plenty of wind bags on TV spouting their unwarranted opinions....plenty of so-called journalists making grandeous statements and demanding the ministers head on a plate....

 

Let's not turn this into some preferential treatment nonsense debate.

 

I'm sure plenty would have seen Shouty and Pouty on ITV this morning doing their usual performance of berating, harrassing, talking over and general ranting during what they laughing deem a political interview. If you haven't, don't worry, the ego filled anchors and the viewer hungry network will be milking it, promoting it and retweeting it for all it's worth.

 

The sad fact is, in all of this hysteria whenever anything like this happens, the people who actually do know what the problem is, do you know who was responsible and do know how to rectify it are never asked. We never actually become proplerly informed of these situations it just descends into one big pot of rumours, second guessing, one upmanship,  tit-for-tat finger pointing and unreasonable demands until eventually some scapegoat gets thrown on the block.

Edited January 20, 2021 by ECCOnoob

[ECCOnoob 1,016]

10 minutes ago, Mister M said:

I've no doubt that she would have had the good grace to attend Parliament to answer questions on the matter, given the gravity of the situation.

But there again, having missed at least 5 COBRA meetings at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, Boris Johnson can hardly admonish his Home Secretary for not demonstrating some impression that she's discharging her duties.

It could be argued that they are not in a position to "answer questions" until they actually know what has happened themselves.

 

It's not as if Parliament is not aware of the incident. There have already been several statements about the nature and extent of the the data believed to have been incorrectly deleted and all these rumours and opinions about how "severe" and "grave" this position is are completely uncorroborated until such time as someone who actually was there doing the deletion work verifies otherwise.   

 

Whilst I'm not oblivious to the fact that she is Home Secretary and "the face" of the sector -  let's not completely forget that the ones actually in charge and actually responsible for this screw up will include layers and layers of highly paid civil servants, chief executives, heads of department, managers and under managers and teams of administrators. They have a role to play and they need to be giving answers just as much as the Minister.

 

The way some of these twitterati and so-called journalists have been talking today it's as if Patel herself popped in and whimsically did a bit of decluttering on the PNC.

[blackydog 40]

12 minutes ago, ECCOnoob said:

Probably about the same as being thrown at Priti Patel.

 

There's hardly been a lack of social media interest about it. We are talking about the subject on this very thread. A quick look at Facebook and Twitter shows plenty of people playing armchair detective, second guessing what has happened, throwing in their ill-informed opinions about how it has happened and what they would do to fix it... plenty of wind bags on TV spouting their unwarranted opinions....plenty of so-called journalists making grandeous statements and demanding the ministers head on a plate....

 

Let's not turn this into some preferential treatment nonsense debate.

 

I'm sure plenty would have seen Shouty and Pouty on ITV this morning doing their usual performance of berating, harrassing, talking over and general ranting during what they laughing deem a political interview. If you haven't, don't worry, the ego filled anchors and the viewer hungry network will be milking it, promoting it and retweeting it for all it's worth.

 

The sad fact is, in all of this hysteria whenever anything like this happens, the people who actually do know what the problem is, do you know who was responsible and do know how to rectify it are never asked. We never actually become proplerly informed of these situations it just descends into one big pot of rumours, second guessing, one upmanship,  tit-for-tat finger pointing and unreasonable demands until eventually some scapegoat gets thrown on the block.

?????? Some of us are discussing how the deleted data could have been recovered. Ok I replied to the Diane Abbot post but that was tongue in cheek, wish I hadn't now .  

[Baron99 772]

1 hour ago, ECCOnoob said:

Probably about the same as being thrown at Priti Patel.

 

There's hardly been a lack of social media interest about it. We are talking about the subject on this very thread. A quick look at Facebook and Twitter shows plenty of people playing armchair detective, second guessing what has happened, throwing in their ill-informed opinions about how it has happened and what they would do to fix it... plenty of wind bags on TV spouting their unwarranted opinions....plenty of so-called journalists making grandeous statements and demanding the ministers head on a plate....

 

Let's not turn this into some preferential treatment nonsense debate.

 

I'm sure plenty would have seen Shouty and Pouty on ITV this morning doing their usual performance of berating, harrassing, talking over and general ranting during what they laughing deem a political interview. If you haven't, don't worry, the ego filled anchors and the viewer hungry network will be milking it, promoting it and retweeting it for all it's worth.

 

The sad fact is, in all of this hysteria whenever anything like this happens, the people who actually do know what the problem is, do you know who was responsible and do know how to rectify it are never asked. We never actually become proplerly informed of these situations it just descends into one big pot of rumours, second guessing, one upmanship,  tit-for-tat finger pointing and unreasonable demands until eventually some scapegoat gets thrown on the block.

My bold. 

 

Very funny, very apt.  😂 

[tinfoilhat 11]

1 hour ago, ECCOnoob said:

It could be argued that they are not in a position to "answer questions" until they actually know what has happened themselves.

 

It's not as if Parliament is not aware of the incident. There have already been several statements about the nature and extent of the the data believed to have been incorrectly deleted and all these rumours and opinions about how "severe" and "grave" this position is are completely uncorroborated until such time as someone who actually was there doing the deletion work verifies otherwise.   

 

Whilst I'm not oblivious to the fact that she is Home Secretary and "the face" of the sector -  let's not completely forget that the ones actually in charge and actually responsible for this screw up will include layers and layers of highly paid civil servants, chief executives, heads of department, managers and under managers and teams of administrators. They have a role to play and they need to be giving answers just as much as the Minister.

 

The way some of these twitterati and so-called journalists have been talking today it's as if Patel herself popped in and whimsically did a bit of decluttering on the PNC.

Seemed to be more on Twitter about pouty's neckline today. Which I'm fine with.

 

But no, let's just leave the government to it, they'll get around to doing something at some point and don't need any oversight or questioning. 

Edited January 20, 2021 by tinfoilhat

[Anna B 1,401]

1 hour ago, ECCOnoob said:

Probably about the same as being thrown at Priti Patel.

 

There's hardly been a lack of social media interest about it. We are talking about the subject on this very thread. A quick look at Facebook and Twitter shows plenty of people playing armchair detective, second guessing what has happened, throwing in their ill-informed opinions about how it has happened and what they would do to fix it... plenty of wind bags on TV spouting their unwarranted opinions....plenty of so-called journalists making grandeous statements and demanding the ministers head on a plate....

 

Let's not turn this into some preferential treatment nonsense debate.

 

I'm sure plenty would have seen Shouty and Pouty on ITV this morning doing their usual performance of berating, harrassing, talking over and general ranting during what they laughing deem a political interview. If you haven't, don't worry, the ego filled anchors and the viewer hungry network will be milking it, promoting it and retweeting it for all it's worth.

 

The sad fact is, in all of this hysteria whenever anything like this happens, the people who actually do know what the problem is, do you know who was responsible and do know how to rectify it are never asked. We never actually become proplerly informed of these situations it just descends into one big pot of rumours, second guessing, one upmanship,  tit-for-tat finger pointing and unreasonable demands until eventually some scapegoat gets thrown on the block.

Really ECCOnoob, you surprise me. You'll be calling it a conspiracy theory next...

[blackydog 40]

13 hours ago, enntee said:

I'm sure that I read somewhere that is wasn't a single action of deletion. More a case that the script written to search and delete by the "clean up" project team had been faulty and doing stuff since November.

Be interesting if you could find a link.