Getting hold of serial numbers

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Sun, Dec 19, 2004 at 04:43:52AM +0000,
 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard at Tesco.NET> wrote 
 a message of 39 lines which said:

> The change window is the other way around, usually.  Registries will
> update the DNS databases (that their content DNS servers publish)
> from the registry database more frequently than they will update the
> NICNAME database (that their NICNAME servers publish) from the
> registry database.

Update your vocabulary: since RFC 3912, the name "NICNAME" disappeared
and, even before that, everybody said "WHOIS".

And for the facts, I seriously question the "usually". Our own name
servers are updated once a day, while the whois data is updated in
real-time (actually near real-time, the time it takes for the Oracle
replica to catch on).