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.
Clearly the solution is to just use a big Excel spreadsheet.
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
Excel is accounting workbook software, it is not suitable for data storage. Although people certainly use it that way.
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.
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.