He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about "poorly batched RPCs" in the timeline which makes zero sense because that's obviously not how HTTP works.
The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, "I'm so smart" idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he's a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.
*Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.
Not just america, my inlaws In Australia think he shits pure gold. They were quite upset when i referred to him as "the perpetually khold idiot manchild" last Christmas
Perhaps you're looking for the "appeal to money" logical fallacy, otherwise known as "argumentum ad crumenam" or "argument to the purse". Not a single word, but it seems to fit the concept.
"Muskian fraud" seems like a good term for someone who desperately claims to be a genius but can't back it up.
"Trumpian fraud" seems like a good term for someone who desperately claims to be wealthy but can't back it up.
The more this dipshit talks about programming the more I'm convinced that he's got absolutely no clue how any of it works. Like, he's famous for creating PayPal, I'm really wondering if he paid someone to code that shit and just took credit (and all the money from its sale).
He didn't create PayPal. He co-founded x.com, and was replaced as ceo for being inexperienced in less than a year. x.com later merged with confinity, which operated PayPal. It was at this point that musk returned as CEO, until he got kicked out again in 2000.
Here's a video out there where he's talking to Twitter devs telling them they need a total rewrite because their stack is too complicated.
Someone gives him the slightest amount of pushback by asking what exactly he means by a rewrite and he cannot give a coherent answer. Someone else asks him to clarify what it is about their stack that is 'crazy'. Elon gets very flustered and can only respond by calling the guy a jackass.
I'd bet a million dollar one of his lil baby faced goons did an export to .csv so Leon could open it up in excel, do a remove duplicate values, and send it back and have the goon could glaze him for being a genius.
No no, billionaires would never steal money after closing down oversight and watchdog agencies, then brazenly starting a new ''office of mysterious authority you don't get to background check that operates in the dark'' and using it to access the most sensitive parts of US government fictionallity. That's crazy talk!
A pretentious asshole billionaire is going to be preaching us about massive fraud. Because he totally earned all his wealth through back breaking honest hard work. Give me a fucking break.
Easy. Just defragment the kernel flux, water root but do not saturate the soil, and then set the virtual tensors to sigWumbo++. If you saturated root then set the tensors to asyncoMumbo-- to account for the extra conductivity. After that refragment the kernel flux because it was happy that way.
I'd bet that the government is probably the largest user of SQL. Unless there are really old systems that predate SQL. I'd imagine they have shitloads of COBOL for example.
If SSN based fraud is the program then let's establish an actual federal identification number. Even the Social Services bureau tried to get everyone to not use it as the end all source of truth. They only created it for social security benefits, literally only that purpose.
In college, early 90s, our student IDs had our photo and SSN on it
I've operated ever since under rhe assumption anyone and everyone has access to it.
Then with all the data breaches over the last 10/15 years? Freeze credit reports with the 3 reporting agencies for free. Check for extra accounts with the free annual credit report pulls.
For all practical purposes, our SSNs are easily obtained by someone who wants it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but a unique identifier has to be housed somewhere where in can be accessed in a format humans can read, which means it can be accessed and dumped so it's no longer private or secret.
I'm not a fan of biometrics, and I tolerate 2FA. I really think it's more important we change how we think about and use personal, unique, identifiers (like SSNs)
It's hard to figure out what he's talking about , when he says the "whole social security database". Like in which tables are they duplicated? Does it mean the entire row is duplicated or just the SSN, it might make sense to be duplicated depending on the schema. Is it an append only db, so there might be updated columns on the same ssn and you need to filter by the latest update timestamp? Who knows.
But also, saying that there's a "social security database" and then following that up by the govt "doesn't use SQL" so.. the db is actually just a spreadsheet? A .txt file? The SSNs are just written down in someone's notebook? Lol
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned. The database could easily be keeping track of all previous assignments for any given SSN.
Remember, SSNs are designed for social security and nothing else. They got picked up as a unique ID by private interests as a hack. They were never supposed to be as widespread in use as they are. The federal government using it this way is the specific, designed use case.
SSNs are reused. Someone dies and their number gets reassigned.
Not even that. If you were born before 2014 or so and you're from somewhere relatively populous theres a pretty good chance there's more than one living human with your SSN right now. SSN were never meant to be unique, the pairing of SSN and name was meant to be unique but no one really checked for that for most of the history of the program so it really wasn't either. The combination of SSN, name and age/birthdate should actually be unique though because of how they were assigned even back in the day.
Musk just uses words to sound smart which is such a stupid thing to do on the internet when so many people can easily call your bullshit.
From rod Hilton on mastodon "He talked about electric cars. I don't know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don't know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I've ever heard anyone say, so when people say he's a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets."
He looked over the shoulder of one of the script kiddies he hired and saw 2 lines with the same SSN, freaked out, remembered some database words he picked up somewhere and hopped on twitter.
Muskrat grew up as a trust fund baby on money from his dad's apartheid emerald mines. He's essentially clueless regarding technical skills and got where he is from just hiring people who knew what they were doing.
Unfortunately there's been a bunch of propaganda over the years making him out to be some super genius that's the lead engineer for all of his companies, and he's since bought into all of it
The manager began to explain in detail some of the obstacles to relocating the servers to Portland. “It has different rack densities, different power densities,” she said. “So the rooms need to be upgraded.” She started to give a lot more details, but after a minute, Musk interrupted.
When Elon bought Twitter, I realised right away I'd need to close my account.
What made me hurry up exporting my data and closing the account were the reports of Elon Musk personally fucking with the systems, and the subsequent glitches and outages. Had to get it done while the site was still moderately functional.
And they just let this guy get his hands on actually important national computer infrastructure? Fucking hell.
Problem is you can't shut down your account with the government because that's your everything. That's your identity, that's your retirement, that's your unemployment. And he's been given carte blanche to fuck with it in any way he feels like by the giant orange douchebag who thinks Elmo's a fucking genius. And the Republican Congress is either unwilling or too scared shitless of his billion$ to get in his way.
Not even that complicated - SSN are not unique, by design. The combination of SSN and name is supposed to be, but for most of the history of the program no one was actually checking for that so it really isn't either. Until something like 2014 the first 5 digits of your SSN were basically a code for where you were born and the last 4 were just assigned in order.
Nah, they are supposed to be unique. If it was that it'd at least be a design choice potentially worthy of criticism. But consider, who's more likely to have fucked up a database task: Musk? Or the designer, someone with a degree (a real degree) on this topic?
Don't worry: since he's so big on transparency, I'm sure he'll release the schema so we can check his work... 🙄
I kind of doubt it. It's been known that he's a fraud of a coder for a while, that seems like a clear riff.
Enough that I was really disappointed when Some More News talked about Zip2 like he was the sole founder and therefore must have been good at coding at some point.
Btw, the guy he and his brother founded the company with died at 51.
As a megarich techie... With the dirt on Elon's real capabilities.
Whenever Elon speaks of programming, he just spouts the most delusional Point-Haired Boss bullshit imaginable. Truly, he has been promoted to the level of his incompetence.
(It is also highly ironic considering the Dilbert creator's politics.)
This sounds just like a former manager that thought nosql was the end all and that SQL had no place.
If course they developed their app that required frequent data migrations because they were in fact very dependent on all the records matching the latest schema.
Difference is, Edison had scientist that invented something useful.
Elon, well...he came up with the idea of a shittier version for busses, trams and subways
He is like tony stark in a timeline where Tony stark decided to join the terrorists instead of building the suit to escape. Oh and in this timeline Tony Starks brain has been rotted away by ketamine
Elon’s shock and fury about the database key sounds like he got a report from an out-of-breath 20 year old DOGE kid who thinks they’re hot shit and discovered some massive flaw.
Elon also seems like the kind of person that believes a database schema is all that’s needed to govern a population.
Database schema = "Not fraudulant", what's so hard about that? Login credentials don't even need to be encrypted if you say no fraud before you log in, and cross your fingers. It's basic programming knowledge, come on man. Also throw some salt over shoulder and slaughter a goat for good measure just in case.
I'm sure folks on here know this, but you know, there's also that 10K a day that don't so...
What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a "natural" key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it'd make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.
SSN is not unique to a person. They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one). Edit: (See responses) It seems I'm misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.
And they're protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don't really want to store them at all (unless you're the SSA, who would have guessed that'd ever come up though!?)
It's so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren't dying.
Small correction to an otherwise great explanation: SSNs are not recycled after death.
**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.
So they’ve issued almost half the possible numbers, current US population is actively using 1/3rd of them. I think unless there is a major drop in birth rates “several generations” is two. Either my great grandkids will be reusing dead people SSNs or there will be 10 digit numbers which is going to be a problem for any systems that coded it as char(9).
Thanks for (starting to) explain this concept to people not accustomed to how the US does their shit.
See, where i live, we used to have for example a Tax-Number. That was a thing the taxdepartment used to identify a person. But if you move from city a to city b, that numbers changes. So if you move a lot, you will have numerous of these.
Now, some 15 years back, the Tax-ID was introduced (fellow residents at this point will lnow it might be Germany) and this number is a one-in-a-kind ID that will only be assigned to you. They create it shortly after birth. My sons first registraion ID was this, before anyrhing else. You will also get a uniqie healthcare-ID that also works like that.
So...how does that work in the US and why is habing a changing number that is not unique helpful? Or what is Elon not getting? I dont get it either because I dont know how this works for you.
The SSN is supposed to just be a number that you give your employers and the IRS so that your social security (the USs blanket retirement savings/pension system) contributions get logged correctly to you and then when you retire you can use that number to get the social security benefits that you paid into. The number has ended up being used for all sorts of things because the USA is slightly broken because it is SORT OF a unique ID number for each US citizen, except of course that it wasn't intended to be that, SSNs are only supposed to be used from first social security contribution (first paycheck) to last social security payout (death) so naturally they can just be recycled.
When you die your social is reused and assigned to someone else eventually. This is what makes it not unique. If something were to screw up in the process the new person could have debt from the prior person for example even though it is not their debt. Another concept common is using the last 4. There are so many conflicts when using just last 4 in a database its bad design.
It's supposed to be unique and might actually be now, but there are def duplicate ssns out there. Craziest identity situation I was told by a project manager of government system that is all about identities. Same First, Same last,same Date of Birth, same SSN; different people.
Weird story, and I have to assume this is data entry error, identity theft, or something else: I couldn't sign up for a hospital billing platform because my name and full birthdate (including year) conflicted with someone else in the system. I called the hospital billing department and they were very confused about the whole situation. It didn't really get resolved, and I basically had to let it go to collections so that I could pay because of the shitty system. I don't have a very common name, and never have had this problem before.
I don't know all the ways but my identity was stolen and I never knew until my attorney was looking at something else for me in conjunction with the social security commission where I lived, and it popped up under a different name. They then accessed my records using other information, and it was the same number. It took a long time to get it sorted. A few years.
It's happened twice to me, I'm now 41. I was able to get it resolved both times but it was not easy and in the first case seriously hurt my credit score for seven years.
SSNs are not reissued after death and never have been. I've been seeing a lot of people comment this, but I'm not sure where they're getting it from. (They're not unique for other reasons, however.)
As the user posted, one human can have more than one SSN in their lifetime. Many humans will never have an SSN. Some of those humans may have a TIN. Some humans may have at least one TIN and one SSN at some point.
You know, the thing that always seemed really scary about the OG Nazis is that they were competent, intelligent, put-together people that were just fucking evil. Then you look at the US Nazis and the fucking bozo density is off the charts, but they seem to be succeeding anyway.
Three possibilities come to mind:
These bozos are going to find out, hard and soon.
The OG Nazis were actually bozos too.
Competence and intelligence doesn't actually matter in running a fascist regime
They were more competent bozos. They ran Germany the way that your stupid friend gets laid more often because they aren’t smart enough to be embarrassed by themselves and they know only one goal.
Whereas these guys run America like an ugly stupid person that insists that no, actually, they have already in fact convinced you to sleep with them despite what your words say and the goal is to confuse you into bed.
Is it also a case of survivorship bias? Like, I am not super versed in Nazi history, but... There are famous "smart" Nazis like Goebbels and Himmler and Speer - are they only well known because a) they slowly emerged as influential and/or b) it became clear years later that they were the ones behind the wheel?
'Cause I do think that trump and musk are dumb as bricks, but I don't think Steve Bannon is, and there are probably others like him..
It's absolutely the second one. They basically all had brain damage from ww1 (who knew explosions are bad for you) and several of them including Hitler were drugged the fuck up. Julius Streicher was a clown, but not like a funny or sad clown, more like pathetic, like honestly comparable to someone from 8chan. Goebbels was a creepy loser. Hitler was a meth addict with ibs and anger issues who spent his last days just destroying the air quality of the bunker he would die in and kept invading countries despite already being at war. Heidrich died by personally chasing after antifascists who happened to have a grenade. And that's not touching on their archeological or spiritual beliefs which are on par with qanon for believability and sensibility
The nazis weren't as competent and intelligent as you suggest, that work was outsourced to IBM - Yes, that IBM.
You know that Watson product that IBM sells and advertises so often? R one that plays chess and was on jeopardy (Fun!) Turns out that Watson was the name of the dude that signed off on them accelerating the Holocaust for the nazis. Some believe the nazis couldn't have been nearly as efficient at unrepentant large scale murder without IBM joining the fray, yet they skate on by...
The very first hacker purposely damaged the contact that read the value that stored if a citizen was Jewish on the punch cards of census data in occupied France (if I'm remembering correctly) it's not known how many he saved but he did pay the ultimate price and died in the concentration camps for his sabotage efforts
Edit: my memory was close. René Carmille specifically delayed the June 1941 report on the numbers of Jewish citizens and foreigners so that it still wasn't complete by the time of his ultimate arrest in 1944, and utilized his position to create extremely real fake identities for escaping refugees amongst other resistance actions
Just look at the military decisions Hitler made, that was luckily an incompetent guy thinking he's smarter than everyone else. That rings a bell, doesn't it?
In the long run, making less stupid decisions wouldn't most likely have changed the outcome, but even more people would likely have died (and unfortunately the people executing the murder of the Jews weren't as incompetent as their glorious leader).
Hopefully all 3 but as the other poster said, Nazis really were clowns.
Sure, Hitler had some early successes militarily - combined arms blitzkrieg was a new deal and effective - but it's not like that won the war. Besides which there is just so much dumbass occult bullshit going on in the background with the Nazis like you would not believe.
You don't need to be smart or super competent to get a bunch of people killed. You just need enough people willing to pull the triggers and for the rest of the people to go along. Going along is easy until it ends with shit like the Holocaust.
I think some of the more intelligent US Nazis are letting the bozos do their thing and riding the coat-tails and avoiding direct blame if things turn. I'm looking at a good chunk of the House and Senate.
OG Nazis were master manipulators, dressed cool as fuck and their propaganda machine was one of the best ever. Intelligent? There is no hard evidence of that, and their military strategies were poorly thought. They had fucking cool weapons and equipment, so maybe good engineers were involved, but that's it.
and the dumb kids, unfortunately. I did a spot with some non-US teenagers, in a class recently. The topic was "name a person you admire and why". Guess whose filthy name came up...
Musk seems to think Musk is a tech genius, but really he was just born into money and used it to buy a bunch of companies. In fairness he was able to recognise which companies to buy, doesn't mean he knows anything about databases though.
In fairness he was able to recognise which companies to buy
I think this is just survivorship bias. There are millions of wealthy individuals investing in companies every single day. Occasionally these gambles pay off and make people extremely wealthy.
Most of the time the people who succeed just spend their incredibe wealth and live a quiet happy life.
But there are others who crave attention. These individuals bully their way into prestigious positions and pretend that they're leading the company.
Elon is that kind of person. He started wealthy, bet his money on companies that succeeded. Then took the CEO role so he would get credit for the companys' successes.
If ever people dare stop paying attention to him he'll do something drastic to recapture the spotlight on.
He's the kind of person who will stand on stage and do a nazi salute just because he wants you to look at him.
It's easy to gamble if money isn't yours. If your day to day survival depends on every dollar, then you don't have the freedom to dick around with investments.
He also apparently watched a lot of SeaQuest DSV, and is trying to make it a reality. Hyperloop: SeaQuest. Electric cars: SeaQuest. Big car dashboard screens: SeaQuest. Magic Space Science: SeaQuest. CyberTruck....Apple Mouse ADB gen 1-ish wrapped in aluminum foil. I guess what I find most fascinating is that I have similar mental maladies to him, but I learned instead of just being perpetually dumb. It is actually disappointing that he chose to not learn and just ride the walrus instead. No idea why anyone worships him.
OT: You reminded me that i never watched seaquest more than a few episodes and i will have to do that now. does it still hold up for someone who loved TNG and Voyager?
Yeah just imagine if his takeaway from getting into cyberpunk had been user serviceable disability aids that are aesthetically cool.
Like i get being into the aesthetics of fiction. I love me some elfcore shit and a variety of sci-fi aesthetics. But man you gotta think about practicality
Of course. Everyone who's ever used a DB knows it's BS. As long as the data is structured - which it a) is because he was able to make assertions about it and b) fucking Excel files are enough - it CAN be imported and SQL'd on. Even Excel has built in support for fuck's sake, not to mention Python and PowerQuery.
The dude is a self-certified moron - he probably struggles with the concept of PKI, too.
He was baffled a building he was opening had a water use plan. You know. That thing everyone who's built a building larger than a shed has to deal with.
Eh ECS is basically all about making SELECT ... FROM bar, baz WHERE bar.id == baz.id, joins on primary keys, as fast as possible and use it as often as possible. Games are real-time databases with gaudy user interfaces so it stands to reason that posgresql is a game with a bland user interface.
As much as I hate to say Elon might be right... The problem is that critical parts of the US government run on systems older than his goon squad. There's actual COBOL in use, right now today, by the US government.
He paid some people to pretend he's the founder, then used that title to build a reputation of being genius and what not. And he's been getting rich off of investor capitol ever since.
I don't know which company he did and didn't start himself. But I know he definitely didn't write the code behind ebay or paypal
His first venture was a business directory on the internet (ie. The yellow pages, but online). No idea if he or this brother actually wrote any code for it, or if they hired someone. Wouldn't surprise me if he didn't do any actual work for that project either.
I think it was something to do with COVID stats during the initial outbreak, but yes, yes it was the UK government and their bizarre love affair with stupid tech choices.
There was also a Harvard paper that was the main justification for austerity in the UK given its conclusion that past a certain GDP/debt ratio al sorts of bad things happen.
Turned out to be an excel error skipping 1/4 of their data and when re-run with the whole set the effect vanished.
Horrible abuses of excel and csv files are by no means limited to any one country.
The only 'transparency' he's shown is screenshots of basic spreadsheets that don't actually clarify anything. His minions are just sending him spreadsheets extracted from systems they don't understand, and he's just making decisions based on whether the title of the program sounds woke or not.
It's going to be fun when he fucks with some Wall Street Equity fund's money.
Elon starting to comment on technical matters was the moment I learned he was actually completely beyond incompetent, since I have some actual expertise on the subject. Right around the time he bought Twitter and commented publicly on its architecture.
Oh, I'm calling it now. This one is going to be used as an attack of trans people. Throw out the archaic and manual process of updating names in federal databases, and keep it simple by making the records immutable. Then hit them with a lovely
"You MUST use your REAL NAME (MAIDEN NAME) on government forms. If the name does not match, you will be denied."
Oh, great. So it's also another regressive push towards recreating the mysognist shithole decades where married women were treated as the property of their husbands. What's next, giving married men in heterosexual relationships two votes?
They already stopped providing passports to trans people, even if they're willing to use their old name and gender. And I'm sure that policy will end up hurting women that changed their name after marriage as well, it anyone that changed their name for whatever reason.
Lmao we’re gonna get to watch eel-on-musk and all of his dipshit wünderkinds speedrun through all of the pitfalls a junior DBA / data engineer is liable to make, and they’re gonna do it on prod, and prod is the US government.
An UPDATE without a WHERE clause that doesn't get noticed for a week or two. Your data's hosed and you can't really cope with reverting to your last known good backup. Bonus points if you haven't tested your recovery procedures recently. Then he runs around screeching about how the data is obviously fraudulent and he's a genius for finding it.
He's going to dedupe the social security databases, thinking that he's screwing over trans people because he thinks they are the only people who change their names... not realizing that the vast majority of married women have at least two names associated with their SSN.
They probably do use lots of NoSQL DBs too, which perform better for non relational "data lake" style architectures where you just wanna dump mountains of data as fast as possible into storage, to be perused later.
When you have cases where you have very very high volume of data in, but very low need to query it (but some potential need, just very low), nosql DBs excel
Stuff like census data where you just gotta legally store it for historical reasons, and very rarely some person will wanna query it for a study or something.
Keep in mind when I talk about low need to query, the opposite high need us on the scale of like, "this db gets queried multiple times per minute'
Stuff like... logins to a website, data that gets queried many times per minute or even second, then sometimes nosql DBs fall off.
Depends what is queried.
Super basic "lookup by ID" Stuff that operates as just a big ole KeyValuePair mapping ID -> Value? And thats all you gotta query?
NoSql is still the right tool for the job.
The moment any kind of JOIN enters the discussion though, chances are you actually wanna use sql now
btw do you know why it was decided to treat the r-word as an ableist slur? And why didn't they also make "idiot" a slur, since it has basically the same etymology? Is this a lemmy-specific thing? I've never seen anyone use or interpret the r-word as a slur outside of lemmy
In contemporary language, that word (among others) is almost entirely used as an insult by way of equating somebody's intelligence with those who have intellectual disabilities, which creates a negative connotation. Similarly, this is why we don't say things we dislike are "gay" anymore. It's disrespectful to the people who actually fall under the definition, and it proliferates negative associations with traits that people are stuck living with and had no choice in acquiring.
The only reason "idiot" hasn't followed suit is because it's much more culturally ingrained, and there's hasn't been as significant of an attempt to change it as with other words.
I've never seen anyone use or interpret the r-word as a slur outside of lemmy
It's not exclusive to Lemmy, but it is mostly left-leaning spaces or gen Z individuals who see it that way. Center and right-leaning spaces see treating the word as a slur to be censorship (as opposed to being respectful of others) and keep using it or actively push back by saying it more.
Not Lemmy specific. There was US legislation related to the word being deemed offensive fifteen years ago (given the slow nature of Congress, it wasn't a new sentiment then, either): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa's_Law
Fair enough that plenty of insulting words could be cast as abelist: but my guess is that a word like "idiot" is old enough that most folks called that in a medical context aren't around any more. Maybe I'm wrong though: plenty of folks do push against saying things like "crazy" in an insulting manner.
See, they want you to believe that SQL stands for Structured Query Language. But I know from our lord and savior Elon that it actually means Socialist Queer Liberals!
Temp Tables: you can make a throw away table where data is all organized how you need it and it just goes away when you're done.
Indexes: stores information about all the data to speed up searches. you can have 10 million rows in SQL and still get pretty quick results.
Relational data store:
The default in SQL is to do a kind of inter-sheet linking. You can set up references so that if you delete a line in one of the linked sheets, it won't let you because there's an active reference to it in another sheet. Like if you try to delete the Ohio Row from the states table, it can be made so that you can't because users are linked to Ohio in their another sheet. (data integrity)
Joins: You can logically link multiple tables together. Your data can be structured over many many tables with a one to many relationship, so massive reduction in storage and memory needs.
Memory: SQL only uses enough memory to load what you're using. You can have a 100GB database and maybe get away with a few gigs of ram. Excel needs to load everything into ram.
Transaction: SQL can wrap a series of operations into a transaction. If there's something wrong with the data, it can rollback everything that happened in the transaction. You can safely operate on large amounts of data without danger of corrupting it if you do something wrong.
Procedures: SQL can store off code and compile it down to be much much faster. you can surface just a simple function instead of full db access and end users have a hard time hacking apps to get data they shouldn't see out of the database.
Replicas: You can set up a secondary server with the same databases and chain them so that the origin server takes all the changes and the secondary server is a backup, read-only replica.
Incremental backups: You can set up the servers so that the changes are noted day in and day out, so if you have a REALLY large database, you can restore it to any point in time with just a regular backup and all the logs for the day up to the latest.
Excel Database:
Tables and Rows
Easy to edit in a client everyone has
Supports some decent macro capability
Can be problematic when more than one person is editing at the same time
In the context of this tweet most important differences are:
SQL is a language for querying databases.
Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, well, relations and constraints.
Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.
When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations are violated.
Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.
Basically the difference is with a SQL database you have way more options for how to create, manage & interact with the data.
Spreadsheets are great for sharing snapshots of data, and there's a level of automation you can build into them, but the scale of what you can do goes up dramatically when your data is in a proper database instead of just an excel file.
A whole lot. Too much to cover in one post in any kind of detail.
A modern relational database management system (RDBMS) is a highly optimized beast. How it accesses storage is very carefully considered. It has a whole mini language for defining relations between data. There are tools for debugging specific queries to make them faster. They index data with tradeoffs between read and write speeds. There are sophisticated locking mechanisms so multiple users can read and write at the same time. They have transactions where many alterations can be packed up together and written efficiently at once. Those transactional alterations are atomic, meaning there are guarantees that all of them happen or none of them happen. The entire thing is based on set theory, and it has survived attacks by many other pretenders to the throne for decades.
And if you're using Oracle, you can get all that while paying a highly optimized pricing model set up by the best financial advisors Larry Ellison can find to maximize value extraction from your company.
And alternatively, for excel once you leave the realm of a single person entering data for a single project over time sizes you start entering the "why does this take 10 minutes to open" territory
SQL is a language used to manage and interact with most relational databases so it is used often to describe relational databases. There are many tables in a relational database, each is very much like an excel tab. The excel spreadsheet can have many tabs relating to each other. So kinda similar. However a relational database is better defined, more functions and forced relationships, and most important space efficenct. Excel takes probably 100-1000 times more space, and that is best case.
Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.
To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what's called a "B Tree" and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a "Directed Acyclic Graph" (although Excel lets you turn off the "acyclic" part if you allow circular references).
Although, with Excel specifically, there's probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.
So they both store data in a table like structure, but that's about where the similarities end.
Excel is useful for handling smaller more flexible data sets, but has performance, scalibility, storage, and structural deficiencies compared to SQL, it's also harder for computer languages to communicate with a shared excel dataset and modify it vs SQL.
One of the major issues with excel as a database is data limits, excel only allows for ~1 million rows. Considering there are ~1 billion possible SSNs, excel would not be a great medium for them for that reason alone.
One big advantage of SQL is you need to structure your data on the creation of the table and it's designed with the expectation that all data will fit a structure, including unique keys, format, and other limits and structures. This allows you to enforce database rules easily and massively reduce storage size and query times.
There are a bunch of other reasons for using SQL but most of it boils down to either it's faster, easier for multiple computers to access and read/modify simultaneously, or better for enforcing rules and structures when modifying it.
Many things. I mean, you could hack a lot of stuff into Excel but generally
SQL has foreign keys and integrity checks. You can make it so like if you delete a user it automatically cascades to delete other rows like their addresses.
You can prevent someone from entering the wrong type of data in particular columns. This one's an integer and that one's text.
It's designed to work on larger scales. Excel stops at 1 million rows per spreadsheet, unless my search just gave me AI slop.
You can do queries, for selecting as well as updating and deleting. You can join tables.
It's much easier for other applications (such as a website) to talk to a SQL database
You can do transactions.
There's a lot. That's just off the top of my head.
dis what you get for working with 19 year old kids with inflated egos whom you only hired to worship you. Also when someone who is not an expert in a field has the confidence to make grand claims about practices in that field, it is a very nice litmus paper telling you that person is generally bullshitting.
Now now, he also has LeAdErShIp skills like taking his incorrect understandings and making the ToUgH dEcIsIoNs and being DeCiSiVe and taking RiSkS that will in no way impact his lifestyle but could destroy the careers and lives of thousands to millions of other people.
Maybe Musk needs to learn about data normalization and natural keys.
I'm curious what the actual data looks like. I've spent quite a bit of time auditing large data systems.
I would expect these databases to be largely denormalized with very wide tables, I would expect them to favour natural keys like a SSNs, and built around per department use cases.
I would not expect them to be highly normalized because then when you need something from another department you need them to ensure consistency.
These systems probably have like 50 years of legacy code or more in them too.
Nah, that’s too fancy. It’s all held together by some arcane Visual Basic macro someone wrote 25 years ago right before going to retirement and no one has dared to touch it ever since.
I've worked on projects for the government as a contractor. There is SQL; SQL as far as the eye can see. I'm sure the NSA has some novel solutions to crunching shittons of big data, but day to day, at least in my experience, it is a lot of relational CRUD and reporting queries.