Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas

March 2, 2025 — Matt Chapman Thomas Ptacek, a friend and expert witness in this lawsuit summed it up best in the court's hallway while walking within three feet of opposing counsel: "This is fucking stupid". His companion post explains why. Intro Working with the City of Chicago's parking ticket data—which I've received through FOIA—has always been a pain, especially in terms of knowing what exactly to request. In August 2018, I attempted to generally solve that problem, by submitting a request for the following: An index of the tables and columns within each table of CANVAS. Please include the column data type as well. Per the CANVAS specification, the database in question is Oracle, so the below SQL query will likely yield the records pursuant to this request: select utc.column_name as colname, uo.object_name as tablename, utc.data_type as type from user_objects uo join user_tab_columns utc on uo.object_name = utc.table_name where uo.object_type = 'TABLE' —CANVAS Database Schem ... Read full article.