Looking for a Database Programmer

[tillyoubreakit]

Hello Hexus Community !!

A joint coorporation project between one of my customers company and mine has come up to our mind and we are looking for someone who is able to create some software to meet the following requirements.

1. Hold min 1TB of "Text" "Video" "Pictures"

2. Can have each selection from the above collected and displayed in a webbased formular in less than 5 seconds.

3. Hold a customer databse and payment options in a webform.

The money avaliable for this project is about 15K$

Our 2 companys are planning this and we are currently checking out the possibility. This is not a 100% job offer. But if something like this is possible and we can find someone who is a "non-talker" and who really knows the stuff than its a great way to make a couple of extra grands a month if the theory is so good that we start.

PS: The basic idea was to use at least 2 Servers with 1 File and 1 linkage server.

So now its up to you guys. Any help, ideas are always welcome.

If this is the wrong site/forum to make these offers than i apologize :-)

[killgORE]

Well... I have had a few thoughts about this idea. I am going to talk about your requirements individually.

1. Hold min 1TB of "Text" "Video" "Pictures"

Could you clarify this for me ? Is this 1 Database Table for each.. or am I totally off track with this. Does min = minimum ? Or is this 1 terra byte of data ??

2. Can have each selection from the above collected and displayed in a webbased formular in less than 5 seconds.

With requirement 2... Do you mean query the database and make a view of the data available through a web browser ? This is fairly common and is how hexus.net itself works. But the 5 sec display limitation is pretty much dependant on the hardware being used.
The server should be fast in terms of processing power, and have the network bandwidth to supply your end users. And for viewing the streamed video your end-users have to have the network bandwidth to get the video in 5 sec... Depending on the size of the video file and considering your end users. This requirement might not be workable.

3. Hold a customer databse and payment options in a webform.

This is straight forward and quite simple to implement. However, there is no harm in trying to clarify everything in a software development project. So.. Is this "customer database" a bunch of data that you hold about your customers ? Or is it a database of information that your customer has, and is willing to give you access to ?

More broadly... It is important to think about how this system is linked. Is it through the internet - with all the security issues this raises - or is it through a direct linking of your systems to your customers through a dedicated link. Is this system simply for b2b - business to business - comunication. Or are normal internet users allowed some form of access.

Hope this helps.

[dgr]

Perhaps I am too unequiped to comment, but I have done some paid web programming, mainly intranet stuff, but 1TB seems a HELL of a lot of data to be pushing to your system users. That probably means a fair chunk of software code, admin code, etc, etc.

It seems to me that that could potentially be far more than a single programmer could carry out - and even so, I wouldn't necessarily recruit over the web, bullitin boards particularly.

J

[dgr]

Oh and £7-8k - for that amount of work, I wouldn't accept - and I'm not even through uni...

SOrry, but thats my oppinion

[tillyoubreakit]

Originally Posted by killgORE

Well... I have had a few thoughts about this idea. I am going to talk about your requirements individually.

1. Hold min 1TB of "Text" "Video" "Pictures"

Well the Databse should hold Technical Information on products as well as pictures, videos etc. There will be a huge catalog of products which is sort of kept in an library.

2. Can have each selection from the above collected and displayed in a webbased formular in less than 5 seconds.

Well the software should be able to read out the data being ordere (video + text + pictues depending on selection) The servers will be very powerfull indeed. If it is possible to write the databse sitting on an Architecture like the IA64 which would give as enough possible memory adressing space, than that would be nice too.

3. Hold a customer databse and payment options in a webform.

Web Payment should be possible, and the the customer should have an account from which he has acces too. Pretty much like ebay.


This is a pure Internet site. So security issues are really big.
Hope this helps.

Thanks a lot for your inputs. :-)

[tillyoubreakit]

Originally Posted by dgr

Oh and £7-8k - for that amount of work, I wouldn't accept - and I'm not even through uni...

SOrry, but thats my oppinion

I am not recruiting over the Internet. I am seeking the possibility to find someone on such a great site as Hexus that has the power and knowledge to do this.

I think its a great thing to give people that are NOT schooled theoretical idiots <--do NOT take offense on this since i dont mean you !!!! a chance. There are many NON theoretical guys out there that can never proove themselves since they dont have a stupid piece of paper. I dont care what school you went to or what you look like. I simply care if you can get the job done in time.

PS: If you still go to school, and wouldnt take a JOB <--better than no job and living off parents and are willing to laugh at 8000lbs than you must be pretty rich already.

:-)

[Iain]

Just so you know, it would be illegal to pay a minor (someone under the age of 16) for this work in the UK. My first question would be exactly how do you intend to draw up the contract of work ?

Secondly, you don't mention the most important and time consuming parts of any project namely
- ownership of the application design
- ownership of test scripts and testing
- ownership of support and the support period

The actual development time would be less than 40% of the time taken on any sizable project.

Also, since someone has expressed an interest in the work and is asking for clarification of the requirements might I suggest that the best response to that isn't

Thanks a lot for your inputs. :-)

but more likely to be answers to the questions raised ?

I genuinely hope you get someone to perform this work but I would strongly suggest you rethink your approach. To learn more I recommend buying this book http://www.sitepoint.com/books/freelance1/

[Stoo]

Furthermore, anyone interested in this would also need to know the timescale, the hardware and the budget (both the full project budget, and the payment to the person taking it on) available for the project.

Personally it seems to me that the requirements haven't been worked out properly..

[killgORE]

Personally.. I was looking to clarify what the system is.. What it should do. Then it should be possible to consider budget.. Which then dictates hardware etc.. You see how thinking like this quickly makes the problem huge. The point is that the discussion seems to have moved away from the core. Which is, surely, helping a fellow hexusian !

I don't really have any intention in tendering my skills for building the thing at this point. I have final exams.. and a rather hefty final year project to get done in the next few months (I am making tools for sending IP packets over DVB networks.. internet through digital TV!). We should help figure out the system limits.. the requirments. So that our dear German friend can decide wether or not to plunge his money into developing the system further.

I agree with Stoo.. lets figure out what the system requirements are. Then other questions can be answered.

[Stoo]

Random thoughts:
I've had experience working on *big* databases (UK Government Employment Service DB, which at the time was one of the largest in europe..), and keeping database time down to an absolute minimum is usually the main concern.
Storing video in a database would mean the opposite to this, as you'd need both a constant and reliable connection to the database in order to stream the video to the end user..

Storing 1TB of data is fairly meaningless unless you know how much and how often that data will be accessed, unless you were only serving a couple of people the $15k budget would be woefully undersized.

At the moment there are just too many information holes to even begin properly speccing a possible solution.

[tillyoubreakit]

Well it really looks like that there are a few missunderstandings here.

1. I am not offering a contract. I am looking for a person that could help us see the broad requirements of this kind of project. If the person is interested, then we would meet in person and do a interview which would also clear any questions regarding payment and product ownership.

2. If you would have closely read my reply, then you would have noticed that i did answere is questions by "quoting" and editing is reply".

3. I was not thinking of paying a minor 8000lbs in britain. It seemed to me like he was saying "I am too good for this, and i laugh at 8k lbs".

4. I will clear up the project.

This is what we want to do.

We want to create a Internet Library here in Germany. The library will hold catagorized information about a specific area in life that people could need. (Television Manuals,Car Manuals, Replacment Parts, Construction Plans, Audio from dialects and much more. These are just a few very minor things, wWe want to store "life" in a digital medium.

We then hope that then people will use this site to find there answere to their questions without getting 20000 results which have to be sorted out before.
And by charging very little money(like 10cents or so !!not figured out yet!! depending on the selection (video+text or text+audio) we make money.

The data is a huge, and the the amount of times that its used cannot be pin pointed right now as we dont know which are is in the biggest public interest.

The money for this project isnt really a concern in the long run. My client is willing to put up 15K for the basis. Just for a modell !! We could even work out that the creator gets a certain percentage of the grand income of the company. But before we start we have to get the basic idea down. And all i am asking here is for some help from my fellow Hexus users to sorta get the basics down, with us. And once we get started and the theoretical stage is completed, then we will be looking for a real person and a real contract which will pay the person or persons for doing the work.

PS: I will stop answereing questions in form of a edited quote and you guys stop with the doubt and i am sure we will all get a long fairely well.

-Florian

We were thinking 2 servers for starters. If it would yield a great benefit to make use of 64bit than we have a chouice of either the AMD side or the Intel side. The servers are not yet here and will be build around the requirements of the software.

[Stoo]

Ah, thanks for that, more information makes it a lot easier to understand

[killgORE]

Hmmm... thats a nice idea. But the searching theory for that amount of data must be pretty intense. Unless you try and categorise and sub categorise every database entry. However, this means loads of extra time constructing the database, and will lead to wrongly categorised entries. Just an idle thought. Not got much time. I am off to the gym.

[Jonny M]

Haven't Google pretty much already done that?

[killgORE]

Well.. google works on Natural language processing techniques. The idea of this project so far has been simply to use a database. Which means categories of information have to be explicitly handled in the database structure, and input from the user has to be very clear, and the SQL statements generated would be pretty insane - but possible to manage.

Google does not have a database of websites, in the same way, that you search through.. there is a lot of string hashing, and page digesting going on. The number of times your key words appear on a page * the probability of them and lots of other things makes a "google".

Be nice to google... its your only friend, and its free !

[TiG]

Just from a technical basis a lot of what has been suggested here doesn't make any sense to me, Databases are good at one thing, storing data, - I'm talking the structure of the content, the fact that we have content on X Y AND Z on file in video image and whatever format.

Sure make yourself a nice neat database with the searching mechanism in here, tie this to your customer database, but storing all this stuff in the database, video and images you MUST BE MAD, as much as database blob's work nicely you don't store this in the database with that volume of data.

The main part of this work would be ensuring that content construction was built up in the correct manner. That would require some well specified system and that my friend is where your design comes in.

What you are asking to be done isn't the work of a programmer, this is the work of a decent project manager, someone who can get the project defined to a much tighter set of requirements who could liase with the programmers to let them know how the content is conceptually laid out, and then work with what i assume would have to be a team of at least 20 people to get the content into the system in teh first place.

And thats what you would have to do if you wanted to make a success out of this, you need all the content and the ability to add content at source as soon as new products come out. This would require speaking to all the consumer goods manufacturers to try and get advanced manuals released.

A rough estimate of the cost of this to setup from my experience would be in the several million mark to do properly and get a system that maintains itself. Sure everyone might like £8k for offering a solution, but quite frankly i'd prefer a £100K slice if this project was truely an option.

TiG