So, this means they either have a local copy on disk of whatever database they're querying, or they're dumping a remote db to disk at some point before/during/after their query, right?
So yeah, she's apparently toting around an external hard drive with a copy of the "multiple terabytes" large US spending database, running queries against it, then dumping the 60k-row result set to CSV for further processing.
I'm still confused at what point the external drive overheats, even if she is doing all this in a "hot humid" hotel room that she can't run any fans I guess because her kids were asleep?
But like, all of that just adds more questions, and doesn't really answer the first one - why?
I run queries throughout the day that can return 8 million+ rows easily. Granted, it takes few minutes to run, but it has never caused a single issue with overheating even on slim pc’s.
This makes no fucking sense. 60k rows would return in a flash even on shitty hardware. And if it taxes anything, it’s gonna be the ram or cpu- not the hard drive.
In my experience, the only time that I've taxed a drive when doing a database query is either when dumping it, or with SQLite's vacuum, which copies the whole thing.
For a pretty simple search like OP seems to be doing, the indices should have taken care of basically all the heavy lifting.
I literally work with ~750,000 line exports on the daily on my little Lenovo workbook. It gets a little cranky, especially if I have a few of those big ones open, but I have yet to witness my hard drive melting down over it. I'm not doing anything special, and I have the exact same business-economy tier setup 95% of our business uses. While I'm doing this, that little champion is also driving 4 large monitors because I'm actual scum like that. Still no hardware meltdowns after 3 years, but I'll admit the cat likes how warm it gets.
750k lines is just for the branch specific item preferences table for one of our smaller business streams, too - FORGET what our sales record tables would look like, let alone the whole database! And when we're talking about the entirety of the social security database, which should contain at least one line each in a table somewhere for most of the hundreds of millions of people currently living in the US, PLUS any historical records for dead people??
Your hard drive melting after 60k lines, plus the attitude that 60k lines is a lot for a major database, speaks to GLARING IT incompetence.
You've got it all wrong, in traditional computer terminology the "hard drive" is the box that sits under the desk that collects cat fluff and cigarette tar.
I don't think I've seen a brand new computer in the past decade that even had a mechanical hard drive at all unless it was purpose-built for storing multiple terabytes, and 60K rows wouldn't even take multiple gigabytes.
I have when a misconfigured spark job I was debugging was filling hard drives with tb of error logs and killing the drives.
That was a pretty weird edge case though, and I don’t think the drives were melting, plus this was closer to 10 years ago when SSD write lifetimes were crappy and we bought a bad batch of drives.
Same as Elon when he confidently told off engineers during his takeover of Twitter or gestures broadly at the Mr. Dunning Kruger himself
Wonder if it’s an SQL DB
Elon probably hired confident right wingers whose parents bought and paid their way through prestigious schools. If he hired anyone truly skilled and knowledgeable, they’d call him out on his bullshit. So the people gutting government programs and passing around private data like candy are just confidently incorrect
What the hell are you doing that your hard drives are overheating? How do you even know it's overheating as I'm like 90% certain hard drives (except NVMe if we're being liberal with the meaning of hard drive) don't even have temperature sensors?
The only conclusion I can come to is that everything he's saying is just bullshit.
Can we think of any device someone might have that would struggle with 60k? Certainly an ESP32 chip could handle it fine, so most IoT devices would work...
Unless the database was designed by someone who only knows of data as that robot from Star Trek, most would be absolutely fine with 60k rows. I wouldn't be surprised if the machine they're using caches that much in RAM alone.
Imo if they can't max out their harddrive for at least 24 hours without it breaking, their computer was already broken. They just didn't know it yet.
Any reasonable SSD would just throttle if it was getting too hot, and I've never heard of a HDD overheating on its own, only if there's some external heat sources, like running it in a 60°C room
Hard Drives might do it if the enclosure is poorly designed (no ventilation), but I can't imagine a situation where it would overheat like that that quickly, even in a sealed box. 30k is nothing in database terms, and if their query was that heavy, it would bottleneck on the CPU, and barely heat the drive at all.
Unless they actually mean the hard drive, and not the computer. I've definitely had a cheap enclosure overheat and drop out on me before when trying to seek the drive a bunch, although it's more likely the enclosure's own electronics overheating. Unless their query was rubbish, a simple database scan/search like that should be fast, and not demanding in the slightest. Doubly so if it's dedicated, and not using some embedded thing like SQLite. A few dozen thousand queries should be basically nothing.