I Hate Flying … To The USA, Irrational Databases, and Air Conditioning

Before I get started, let me just say I like visting the USA, wandering about the countryside, the national/state parks, and enjoy the company of the people there.

I am sat in Dublin airport right now.  I am on my way to Seattle via Chicago.  My Dublin – Chicago flight will take around 7 hours.  Correction … let’s count the amount of time that the airline wants me to spend in the airport.  My Dublin-Chicago flight will take 10.5 hours.  One third of the 1600 mile flight will be spent in an over heated excuse for an over priced mini shopping centre where I cannot go outside for some fresh air.

But all airports are like that.  Stuffy, dry, cramped, oh … there’s a vending machine that sells cool drinks for twice their normal price, and would you like an hour of wifi for $7?  Security queues are too long because only a small fraction of the scanning machines are staffed.  Restaurants are full of dried, heated food that tastes worse than their airplane food and seems like it’s less of a bargain.  And there’s the people … *£$^£&£”% … I cannot stand the idiots who seem to pack these places.  I long for the days when Aer Fungus had a reasonable card scheme and I could hide away in a lounge.

But the experience to travelling to the USA usually starts long before you get into your car, taxi, bus or train.  It starts once you book your plane ticket.

Let me first say I have no problem filling in forms for a visa waiver or customs declarations.  I’m totally OK with that.  I cannot stand wasted effort.

The first thing you need to do when travelling to the States is ESTA.  Basically, that’s an application to fill in an application.  You know, it’s like a meeting about a meeting.  ESTA is an online form where you answer the questions that are on the paper visa waiver form.  It must be completed in order to submit a paper visa waiver form.  Both have identical questions.  And of course, the answers must be identical.  I thought that was pretty mad.  How about giving people the chance to do one or the other.

I once had an argument with someone about ESTA.  The other person said it was necessary to gather information about the passenger.  Fine … but there is nothing different between this and the green visa waiver card.  The next response was that it’s the 21st century and we should go digital.  Fine, but why do we also need to do the green paper form that is identical?  It was an unwinnable argument for the opposing view.  It is there just because it is there.  You know, there must be a massive amount of data gathered for ESTA every year.  I bet that requires a lot of SAN storage, replication and backup.  Someone like HP or EMC is making a stack of cash on that.

But it gets worse.

When I booked my flight I soon found out (I forget how) that I needed to complete another online form.  I think it was called the advanced passenger information form.  I logged in and was greeted by the same questions I had just answered for ESTA.  The USA Homeland Security department needed a third copy of this data.  This seems like a crude form of replication.  Can’t they order SAN controller replication instead, or maybe do it at the database level?  I’m told SQL is quite good at this.

Time goes by and 3 days before my flight, Aer Fungus sends me a reminder email of my flight.  They also remind me about the need for ESTA, the advanced passenger information form, and the passenger address information form.  The what?  Here we go again.  No wait; no one is that stupid to ask for the same set of information a fourth time.  I log in and there are the same questions again: name, passport number, issue date, expiration date, address in the USA, etc.  There is also a warning that the answers I give on this form must match those on the other forms or I will be declined access to the USA.  It’s incredible.

I am no DBA but I did do database classes in college back in the early 90’s.  Most of the lectures we got were cogged from books written in the 1970’s and 1980’s – they were in the library, fading and falling apart for any one to use.  We learned about data storage optimization for relational databases called normalisation.  1st normalised form, 2nd, 3rd, all the way to Boyce-Codd, and even on beyond that where it stopped making sense to me.  It seems that who ever is consulting for the USA department of Homeland Security uses irrational databases instead where data needs to be inputted 4 times: green waiver form, ESTA, advanced passenger information and passenger address information.  It’s pure stupid and the only people gaining anything are the storage companies who must be laughing all the way to the bailed out banks. 

I just got it!  This must be how the Fed props up the hardware companies during the recession?  Wasted  and duplicated petabytes of data that will never be used.  The data isn’t being used for security reasons.  We know that.  A known terrorist suspect managed to get on a plane to the USA and tried to set fire to his explosive crotch … damn that sounds like the plot to a bad Jean-Claude Van Dam movie.

I’ve got some advice for them.  In the northwest USA, there will be 1,300 of some of the world’s best IT people around next week.  Conveniently, they’ll be in Microsoft’s Redmond campus.  That’ll include software developers, security experts and DBA’s.  Send someone on up and ask a few questions.  You might learn how to gather the information you need with one form and store it just once.  You’ll accomplish a few things with that.  You’ll save millions every year and have a thankful American citizen/tax payer.  You’ll also stop alienating the legal visitors to your country who are bringing money to spend on your economy.  The experience of flying is bad enough without making it feel like a tax audit from hell that you might find in a book like 1985.