How big is the Coins database?
The shadow chancellor George Osborne would like to see the government's Coins database.
This isn't a store of information on the properties of the nation's loose change, it's the Combined Online Information System and contains the Treasury's detailed analysis of departmental spending under thousands of category headings.
Mr Osborne has promised that if he becomes chancellor he will make it public. Meanwhile the government won't give him access to it, and earlier this year Mr Osborne made a fuss about that.
I put in a freedom of information request for the database. The Treasury has now turned this down. It argues that much of the data is published anyway in aggregate form and that the database itself involves proprietary software whose disclosure would breach commercial confidentiality.
It also told me that the information in Coins could not practically be exported into another programme, because the database contains approximately 2.4 million lines of data. Shortly afterwards an official e-mailed me to say that it actually contains about 24 million lines of data.
Is it normal for Treasury estimates to be out by a factor of 10?
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Is it normal for Treasury estimates to be out by a factor of 10?
No that is abnormally accurate for them ;-)
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What complete and utter piffle, that it cannot "practically be exported into another programme", due to its size at 24 million rows. 24 million rows is nothing these days. The freedb music database has over 20 million rows, and I recently imported that into a database on my woefully underpowered netbook! Not a fair comparison of course, because the schema will be different, but still.
As for the argument that, "the database itself involves proprietary software whose disclosure would breach commercial confidentiality". As it's creators, I can only presume HM Treasury owns the copyright on the contents of the database. If that's the case I can't see what the software has to do with it. What proprietary software is it? Does it have export functionality? If it does, then I see no reason why exported data would cause problems with regard to commercial confidentiality?
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What #2 said, 24 million lines of data is nothing these days.
I hope the Tories do follow through on their pledge of opening up the data on government finances. Apart from the improvement in transparency I can forsee all sorts of interesting analysis and mash-ups that could be done with the data.
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Just to repeat what been said above - 24 million rows of data is a trivial amount.
I can buy a terabyte portable USB drive for less than £75. That would hold 24 million rows of 40,000 bytes per row I doubt that this database has anywhere near that amount of data.
Relational databases can all export the data as comma separated files which can be easily imported into other database systems. No doubt the data is held in multiple tables with complex relationships between them. This is not a problem as there is a standard way of describing the format and relationships between tables which all database systems can produce and understand.
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Clearly they are not telling the truth. I think I'm right in saying though that there are no penalties for civil servants giving deliberately mendacious responses.
In one of my own FoI requests, I had a response that I was later able to prove was not true. It will be interesting to see what steps the ICO takes if and when he finally gets round to it.
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