I’m a tech interested guy. I’ve touched SQL once or twice, but wasn’t able to really make sense of it. That combined with not having a practical use leaves SQL as largely a black box in my mind (though I am somewhat familiar with technical concepts in databasing).
With that, I keep seeing [pic related] as proof that Elon Musk doesn’t understand SQL.
Can someone give me a technical explanation for how one would come to that conclusion? I’d love if you could pass technical documentation for that.
The US government pays lots of money to Oracle to use their database. And it’s not for BerkleyDB either. (Poor sleepy cat). Oracle provides them support for their relational databases… and those databases use… SQL.
Now if Musk tries to end the Oracle contracts, then Oracle’s lawyers will go after his lawyers and I’m a gonna get me some popcorn. (But we all know that won’t happen in any timeline… Elon gotta keep Larry happy.)
The ignorance of Elon is truly concerning, but somehow the worst part to me is Elon calling someone a retard for pointing that out.
Clearly the solution is to just use a big Excel spreadsheet.
One company I worked for used a shared folder of a ton of these excel sheets all that shared the same format. It was god awful. Thankfully one of the reasons I was hired was helping them migrate to a true SQL solution which enabled a lot of applications to work with their data.
In our company I’m friends with one of the lead devs. He once told me “no matter what way you look at it, excel is never the answer” lol I’m sure he was a bit biased, but I’ve seen my fair share of macro-ridden abominations over the years
It makes a pretty good calculator. 🧮
It’s an amazing tool if only one person is updating / maintaining the file. The moment collaboration starts, you’re all fucked. I’m currently maintaining one that I inherited that is at least 10 years old and comes with a 50 page instruction manual on how to run it every month… that then gets posted to a shared drive where anyone can edit.
And then the rest of the month is spent explaining to the end users how they fucked it up this time.
On the flip side, I’ve also built sheets that could parse data between Nav, MySQL, and SQL ERP systems with tables of over 5million rows each on a single button refresh that ran flawlessly for years… because I was the only maintainer and the sheets were locked from accepting changes from other users.
It doesn’t matter anymore to the trumpers. They are eating this shit up like it’s thanksgiving
As a data engineer for the past 20+ years: There is absolutely no fucking way that the us gov doesnt use sql. This is what shows that he’s stupid not only in sql but in data science in general.
Regarding duplications: its more nuanced than those statements each side put. There can be duplications in certain situations. In some situations there shouldnt be. And I dont really see how duplications in a db is open to fraud.
Yeah, obviously ol’ boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn’t used in the government.
Big thing I’m prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn’t understand how SQL works).
If it’s used as an identifier to link together rows from different tables. Also known as “joining” tables. SSN (with birthdate) is a unique identifier, and so it’s natural to choose as a primary/foreign key.
He is saying the US government doesn’t use structured databases.
At least 90% of all databases have a structure.
Yeah, obviously ol’ boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn’t used in the government.
Big thing I’m prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn’t understand how SQL works).
Musk’s statement about the government not using SQL is false. I worked for FEMA for fourteen years, a decade of which was as a Reports Analyst. I wrote Oracle SQL+ code to pull data from a database and put it into spreadsheets. I know, I know. You’re shocked that Elon Musk is wrong. Please remain calm.
Yeah, obviously ol’ boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn’t used in the government.
Big thing I’m prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn’t understand how SQL works).
As a former DOD contractor I can also confirm we built whole platforms that use Oracle (shudder) SQL
I work for a crown corp in Canada we have, off the top of my head, about 800 MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, Postgres databases across the org (I manage our CMDB). Musk is a retard. The world runs on SQL.
He wouldn’t know this though because he’s a techbro that builds apps with MongoDB b cause he doesn’t understand what normalizing data is and why SQL is the best option for 99.9999999% of applications.
Fucking idiots.
Elmo Susk surely thinks they store everything on excel.
Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Its because the comments he made are inconsistent with common conventions in data engineering.
- It is very common not to deduplicate data and instead just append rows, The current value is the most recent and all the old ones are simply historical. That way you don’t risk losing data and you have an entire history.
- whilst you could do some trickery to deduplicate the data it does create more complexity. There’s an old saying with ZFS: “Friends don’t let friends dedupe” And it’s much the same here.
- compression is usually good enough. It will catch duplicated data and deal with it in a fairly efficient way, not as efficient as deduplication but it’s probably fine and it’s definitely a lot simpler
- Claiming the government does not use SQL
- It’s possible they have rolled their own solution or they are using MongoDB Or something but this would be unlikely and wouldn’t really refute the initial claim
- I believe many other commenters noted that it probably is MySQL anyway.
Basically what he said is
incoherentinconsistent with typical practices among data engineersto anybody who has worked with larger data.In terms of using SQL, it’s basically just a more reliable and better Excel that doesn’t come with a default GUI.
If you need to store data, It’s almost always best throw it into a SQLite database Because it keeps it structured. It’s standardised and it can be used from any programming language.
However, many people use excel because they don’t have experience with programming languages.
Get chatGpt to help you write a PyQT GUI for a SQLite database and I think you would develop a high level understanding for how the pieces fit together
Edit: @zalgotext made a good point.
Great explanation, but I have a tiny, tiny, minor nit-pick
Basically what he said is incoherent to anybody who has worked with larger data.
I’m being pedantic, but I disagree with your wording. As a backend dev, I work with relational databases a ton, and what Musk said wasn’t incomprehensible to me, it just sounded like something a first year engineer fresh out of college would say.
Again, the rest of your explanation is spot on, absolutely no notes, but I do think the distinction between “adult making up incomprehensible bullshit” and “adult cosplaying as a baby engineer who thinks he’s hot shit but doesn’t know anything beyond surface level stuff” is important.
Fair point, I’ve edited the answer to be clearer for future readers.
There’s an old saying with ZFS: “Friends don’t let friends dedupe”
That’s a bad example to reference. The ZFS implementation of deduplication is poorly thought out, and I say that even though I like and run ZFS on my own Linux server(s). I understand that the BTRFS implementation of dedupe works well (no first-hand experience), and the Windows one works great (first-hand experience).
I’ve had a poor experience with btrfs dedupe tbh (and a terrible experience with qgroups), however, this was years ago. Btrfs snapshots I prefer though, much easier not to have that dependence.
What distro are you using for ZFS, void?
It was a great answer until the very last sentence. ChatGPT is never a reference for anything ever if you have any fraction of a brain.
I have a fraction of a brain, I think, and use ChatGPT as a guide so that I have something to start with. Even if it’s slightly off, my two brain cells can pick it out and go from there. It’s not so bad.
And you know, I get it if you don’t like AI, but let’s be honest about it at the very least.
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To be honest it’s a shit solution that makes you worse by merely using it.
I mostly ask it things I don’t know, though. I’m not exporting my thinking to it.
I ask it difficult translations, how to code something I’m unfamiliar with, help with grammar, i use it as an OCR for other languages, to help me remember things I can’t directly search, etc. I have a hard time believing all use is detrimental, especially when you’re filling in the gaps of your knowledge and a best guess will do. It’s surely better than a web search for things you don’t even know how to write in a search box.
You sound like common sense and the other person sounds like they have an axe to grind.
I mostly ask it things I don’t know, though. I’m not exporting my thinking to it.
Exhibit A
Which are then obviously confirmed with a web search. Jesus, spare me the cynicism.
And I’m just going to say this as a general observation, but the user base of the fediverse is pretty sophisticated at this time to be assuming shit like this. You make this place hostile by not giving the benefit of the doubt, you know. And even then. How hard is it to not think the worst of everyone you come across online? So ridiculous and petty.
I disagree, it’s just a tool. It’s a fantastic way to template applications very quickly, particularly for those who are not already familiar with technologies and may not have the time or opportunity to play around with things otherwise.
Llm is not a search engine and it can produce awful code. This is not production code, it’s for tinkering. As a sandbox tool, LLMs are fantastic.
On the ethical side of things, yeah openAI sucks, Qwen2.5 would be up to this task, one can run that locally.
It’s a disinformation machine which completely lacks all context. If it’s about 85% accurate to average internet denizens and 15% halucination, then it’s an absolutely atrocious source to learn from. You’re literally lying to yourself, that is what the tool does.
Well Ive ad a great time using LLMs to sandbox a dozen implementations and then investigate the shortcoming and advantages of different implementations.
Mistakes happen a lot but they can be managed on a small MWE with a couple of tests.
It’s how the tool is used more than any given tool being bad.
I understand your point and you’re not wrong. However, I’m not wrong either and you should take a second look at how you might use these tools in a way that makes your life easier and addresses the valid limitations you’ve described.
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- It is very common not to deduplicate data and instead just append rows, The current value is the most recent and all the old ones are simply historical. That way you don’t risk losing data and you have an entire history.
I’m still learning SQL, so if I’m out of line someone please correct me, but, the gist of it, is that SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language used in pretty much all relational databases, which with something like the Social Security database is almost guaranteed. Having duplicates of information in a relational database is not a sign of fraud, or anything shady going on.
When you’re born, your name, along with your SSN and any other relevant info is put into the database, later in life, say you change your name, the original name, along with your SSN will stay there, and a new line in the database would be added with your new name, along with your SSN again (a duplicate) that way the database has a reference point between old and new name, and keeps all your information lined up between the two.
If you were to get rid of all of that duplicate information, anyone who’s ever had a name change, been married, etc. It will cause chaos in the database, with hundreds of millions of entries that now have no relation to anything, and are now just basically dead ends.
because he doesn’t understand that SSNs aren’t globally unique when you account for time.
Barry Allen born in 1905 has SSN 123-44-5678. Barry died in 1983.
Clark Kent was born in 1996 with SSN 123-44-5678.
Musks assumption of a deduplicated DB table ignores the fact that SSNs were never designed to be GUIDs. he lacks the fundamentals of basic data modeling and critical thinking needed to understand a simple construct that a child could grasp.
This is why he doesn’t understand SQL. He also doesn’t understand COBOL, which SSNs were built on top of.
This isn’t because Elon Musk is an idiot.
#Elon Musk is a criminal.
Elon Musk is also an idiot. He thinks he’s smart enough to quickly understand complex situations and complex problems about which he knows next to nothing, within just a few minutes.
Most people would only try to claim that level of understanding in areas with which they have professional experience or about which they’re extremely geeky. He does it with everything, and nobody can be an expert in everything, and everybody knows that except for narcissistists.
I suppose for non-tech people it might be convenient to assume that because someone knows something about some kind of tech, they therefore know a lot about all kinds of tech, and the reality is that’s just not true. There are so many fields that are totally different. But if it did, actually he would look even more idiotic, because Twitter is a train wreck, so clearly he’s incompetent in tech field, right?
Wait, SSNs weren’t designed to be GUIDs? I mean, I fully follow that they aren’t and we’ve had to reuse them when the circle of life does its thing, but I thought they were just designed poorly and we found out the hard eay they don’t work as GUIDs. What purpose were they designed for if not to act as GUIDs?
They were designed to be only used for the administration of social security. Since they were sending monthly checks, they needed a way to know that the person going to the office and saying their address changed was who they said they were. This was at a time before driver’s licences were common and they didn’t have any other type of ID, and there were just a lot fewer people.
Later on the SSN started to be used by banks and other entities even though it was never meant for that, and the risks associated with the relatively insecure design just compounded, because instead of just fraudulently claiming someone else’s social security checks (which, unless the target died, would probably be figured out within a month), it opened up all sorts of extra avenues for fraud.
The sheer size of the federal government and its age would mean there are thousands of databases out there. Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
That alone makes his comment come from a place of ignorance. Of course it’s confident ignorance. The worst kind.
Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that lend credence to his assertion that it’s incorrect to assume that everything in government is SQL?
People here are being irrationally obtuse about the possibility that an agency that’s existed since the 1930s may keep business-critical records on legacy systems predating relational databases. Systems serving a national agency may not migrate databases frequently.
What’s he’s arguing is that the government doesn’t use SQL at all.
Definitely “Confidently Incorrect” material.
The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
The SSN is 9 digits long; so technically they would have to start re-using them after the billionth one. Given the current population size, and how many people have been born/died since its implementation - it’s fair to say they haven’t had to re-use any figures yet.
The number is structured though. Some positions represent things like the geographic region you were born in, others relate to the year you were born. That drastically cuts down the available numbers as the entire range isn’t available in all situations.
They have several generations to go. Literally not a problem for us or our grandchildren.
Not to mention, anyone who has worked in the US gets a SSN, not just citizens or current residents.
I know a bunch of people over here in europe who have them after working a few months/ years in the US.
Right. Fingers crossed we figure out national IDs before then.
Papers please
Elin musk is a (criminal) scammer, he always has been.
He was fired for incompetence from his own company
Pretty much everything he’s promised for every company he has headed had been a lie. Tesla full self driving? Lie. Hyperloop? All lies to successful kill high speed rail and start a movement that wasted billions of dollars including tax payer money. Even SpaceX, the least shit of all, is shit. Once you really look at it, its all promises with no results and lots of cheering when millions of tax payer dollars -yet again- blow up in the sky.
The guy has one quality: convincing people that he’s smart even though he literally doesn’t know shit
Lol talk about burying the lede… The issue here is that the government absolutely uses SQL to traverse a DB and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot.
Naw, I definitely meant to be asking about duplication of data in databases (vs if the government actually uses SQL).
Sorry to have communicated that so poorly. Everyone seems to be taking the angle you’re arguing though. Guess I’ll need to work on that.
Elon Musk’s degree is in economics. He might be a script kiddie.
But I was assured he was a materials engineer, rocket scientist, computer programmer, and businessman extraordinaire!
I’m not arguing that Elon musk is anything but an absolute tool.
SS numbers have 999 million options. Are we already repeating them?
We have over 300 million people in the US right now. Social security started in the US in 1935 with just over 127 million people then.
Yeah, we probably have gone through 999 million options by now.
I don’t think we’ve gone through 999 million options yet. Only about 350 million people have been born since 1933, so even if we add all 127 million US citizens alive in 1935, that’s just over half of the possible social security numbers.
The reason we’ve likely reused numbers is because they weren’t randomly assigned until like 2011. Knowing that I was born in 1995 in Wichita, KS, you could make an educated guess at the first three digits of my SSN
We have 335 million people in this country literally right now. I don’t think “350 million born since 1933” makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.
Edit: number fixin
Not every person in the United States was born in the United States and even temporary workers can get a SSN
I mean you can check my math, I just added up all the births per year in this article
Rounding to one significant figure, it’s 311.9 million people born in the US between 1933 and 2018. Adding an average of 4 million births per year since then, it’s 335.9. I rounded up to 350 to bring it to a nice round number
A bit of research tells me that around 44.8 million of us are first generation immigrants, so 291.1 million were born here. Is it reasonable to assume that 291.1 out of the 335.9 million people born since 1933 have survived so far? I have absolutely no idea, I’m not a professional census taker
Well, I think this is twice in the same thread where my intuition was considerably off base. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Said this elsewhere, but wanted to be sure you had the chance to see the linked material. The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
Just read that, and it says they’ve only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would’ve been a lot more than that.
I don’t want to come off as a bot spamming this in a bunch of different comment threads, but The Social Security FAQ page (Q 20, specifically) says that they do not do re-use of old SSNs when people die.
Because of course the government uses SQL. It’s as stupid as saying the government doesn’t use electricity or something equally stupid. The government is myriad agencies running myriad programs on myriad hardware with myriad people. My damned computers at home are using at least 2-3 SQL databases for some of the programs I run.
SQL is damn near everywhere where data sets are found.
It’s entirely possible that the database is pre SQL.
Yeah, obviously ol’ boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn’t used in the government.
Big thing I’m prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn’t understand how SQL works).
SSNs being duplicated would be entirely expected depending upon the table’s purpose. There are many forms of normalization in database tables.
I mean just think about this a little bit, if the purpose is transactions or something and each row has a SSN reference in it for some reason, you’d have a duplicate SSN per transaction row.
A tiny bit of learning SQL and you could easily see transactional totals grouped by SSN (using, get this, a group by clause). This shit is all 100% normal depending upon the normalization level of the schema. There are even – almost obviously – tradeoffs between fully normalizing data and being able to access it quickly. If I centralize the identities together and then always only put the reference id in a transactional table, every query that needs that information has to go join to it and the table can quickly become a dependency knot.
There was a “member” table for instance in an IBM WebSphere schema that used to cause all kinds of problems, because every single record was technically a “member” so everything in the whole system had to join to it to do anything useful.
had to join to it
I don’t think I get what this means. As you describe it, that reference id sounds comparable to a pointer, and so there should be a quick look up when you need to de-reference it, but that hardly seems like a “dependency knot”?
I feel like this is showing my own ignorance on the back end if databasing. Can you point me to references that explain this better?
Oh, well another user pointed out that SSN’s are not unique, I think they are recycled after death or something. In any case, I do know that when the SSN system was first created it was created by people who said this is NOT MEANT to be treated as unique identifiers for our populace, and if it were it would be more comprehensive than an unsecure string of numbers that anyone can get their hands on. But lo and behold, we never created a proper solution and we ended up using SSN’s for identity purposes. Poop.
I’m pretty sure there is a federal statute that says ONLY the SSA may collect or use SSNs, as to federal agencies. I argued it once when a federal agency court tried to tell me that it couldn’t process part of my client’s case without it. I didn’t care but my client was crotchety and would only even give me the last four.
Edit. It’s a regulation:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/28/802.23
An agency cannot require disclosure of an SSN for any right or benefit unless a specific federal statute requires it or the agency required the disclosure prior to 1975.
In my case the agency got back to me with some federal statute that didn’t say what they said it said, and eventually they had to admit they were wrong.
Aha Airforce one likely uses SQL
Everything they don’t understand (which is nearly everything) is either God or fraud. Do with that information what you will.
Well, here it’s Cake or Death! Choose carefully.
How come republicans keep saying that doggy is going to expose all the fraud in the government but yet the biggest fraud with 37 felonies is president? What the actual fuck to these people think?
Because those are all false charges according to them.
The statement “this [guy] thinks the government uses SQL” demonstrates a complete and total lack of knowledge as to what SQL even is. Every government on the planet makes extensive and well documented use of it.
The initial statement I believe is down to a combination of the above and also the lack of domain knowledge around social security. The primary key on the social security table would be a composite key of both the SSN and a date of birth—duplicates are expected of just parts of the key.
If he knew the domain, he would know this isn’t an issue. If he knew the technology he would be able to see the constraint and following investigation, reach the conclusion that it’s not an issue.
The man continues to be a malignant moron
The initial statement I believe is down to a combination of the above and also the lack of domain knowledge around social security. The primary key on the social security table would be a composite key of both the SSN and a date of birth—duplicates are expected of just parts of the key.
Since SSNs are never reused, what would be the purpose of using the SSN and birth date together as part of the primary key? I guess it is the one thing that isn’t supposed to ever change (barring a clerical error) so I could see that as a good second piece of information, just not sure what it would be adding.
Note: if duplicate SSNs are accidentally issued my understanding is that they issue a new one to one of the people and I don’t know how to find the start of the thread on twitter since I only use it when I accidentally click on a link to it.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?
A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.
Take this with a grain of salt as I’m not a dev, but do work on CMS reporting for a health information tech company. Depending on how the database is designed an SSN could appear in multiple tables.
In my experience reduplication happens as part of generating a report so that all relevant data related to a key and scope of the report can be gathered from the various tables.
A given SSN appearing in multiple tables actually makes sense. To someone not familiar with SQL (i.e. at about my level of understanding), I could see that being misinterpreted as having multiple SSN repeated “in the database”.
Of all the comments ao far, I find yours the most compelling.
Theoretically, yeah, that’s one solution. The more reasonable thing to do would be to use the foreign key though. So, for example:
SSN_Table
ID | SSN | Other info
Other_Table
ID | SSN_ID | Other info
When you want to connect them to have both sets of info, it’d be the following:
SELECT * FROM SSN_Table JOIN Other_Table ON SSN_Table.ID = Other_Table.SSN_ID
EDIT: Oh, just to clear up any confusion, the SSN_ID in this simple example is not the SSN itself. To access that in this example query, it’d by SSN_Table.SSN
This is true, but there are many instances where denormalization makes sense and is frequently used.
A common example is a table that is frequently read. Instead of going to the “central” table the data is denormalized for faster access. This is completely standard practice for every large system.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it can be easily misused. With SSN, I’d think the most stupid thing to do is to use it as the primary key. The second one would be to ignore the security risks that are ingrained in an SSN. The federal government, being large as it is, I’m sure has instances of both, however since Musky is using his possy of young, arrogant brogrammers, I’m positively certain they’re completely ignoring the security aspect.
To be a bit more generic here, when you’re at government scale you’re generally deep in trade-off territory. Time and space are frequently opposed values and you have to choose which one is most important, and consider the expenses of both.
E.g. caching is duplicating data to save time. Without it we’d have lower storage costs, but longer wait times and more network traffic.
Yeah, no one appreciates security.
I probably overused that saying to explain it: ‘if theres no break ins, why do we pay for security? Oh, there was a break in - what do we even pay security for?’
Yeah, I work daily with a database with a very important non-ID field that is denormalized throughout most of the database. It’s not a common design pattern, but it is done from time to time.
Yeah, databases are complicated and make my head hurt. Glancing through resources from other comments, I’m realizing I know next to nothing about database optimization. Like, my gut reaction to your comment is that it seems like unnecessary overhead to have that data across two tables - but if one sub-dept didn’t need access to the raw SSN, but did need access to less personal data, j could see those stored in separate tables.
But anyway, you’re helping clear things up for me. I really appreciate the pseudo code level example.
It’s necessary to split it out into different tables if you have a one-to-many relationship. Let’s say you have a list of driver licenses the person has had over the years, for example. Then you’d need the second table. So something like this:
SSN_Table
ID | SSN | Other info
Driver_License_Table
ID | SSN_ID | Issue_Date | Expiry_Date | Other_Info
Then you could do something like pull up a person’s latest driver’s license, or list all the ones they had, or pull up the SSN associated with that license.
The SSN is likely to appear in multiple tables, because they will reference a central table that ties it all together. This central table will likely only contain the SSN, the birth date (from what others have been saying), as well as potentially first and last name. In this table, the entries have to be unique.
But then you might have another table, like a table listing all the physical exams, which has the SSN to be able to link it to the person’s name, but ultimately just adds more information to this one person. It does not duplicate the SSN in a way that would be bad.It is common for long lived databases with a rotating cast of devs to use different formats in different tables as well! One might have it as a string, one might have it as a number, and the other might have it with hyphens in the same database.
Hell, I work in a state agency and one of our older databases has a dozen tables with databases.
- One has the whole thing as a long int: 222333444
- One has the whole thing as a string: 2223334444 (which of course can’t be directly compared to the one that is a long int…)
- One has separate fields for area code and the rest with a hyphen: 222 and 333-4444
- One has the whole thing with parenthesis, a space, and a hyphen as a string: (222) 333-4444
The main reason for the discrepancy is not looking at what was used before or not understanding that they can always change the formatting when displayed so they don’t need to include the parenthesis or hyphens in the database itself.
Okay but if that happens, musk is right that that’s a bit of a denormalization issue that mayne needs resolving.
SSNs should be stored as strings without any hyphen or additional markup, nothing else.
- Storing as a number can cause issues if you ever wanna support trailing zeros
- any “styling” like hyphens should be handled by a consuming front end system, you want only the important data in the DB to maximize query times
It’s more likely though it’s just a composite key…
This is not what he is actively doing though. He isn’t trying to improve databases.
He is tearing down entire departments and agencies and using shit like this to justify it.
Sure but my point is, if it was the scenario you described, then Elon would be talking about the right kind of denormalization problem.
Denormalization due to multiple different tables storing their own copies of the same data, in different formats worse yet, would actually be the kind of problem he’s tweeting about.
As opposed to a composite key on one table which means him being an ultracrepidarian, as usual.
Musk canceled the support for the long running Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) which is an initiative to promote better database standards and normalization for the states to address this kind of thing.
It does not fucking matter if he is technically correct about one tiny detail because he is only using to to destroy, not to improve efficiency.
Beat me to asking this follow up, though you linking additional resources is probably more effort that I would have done. Thanks for that!
