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.
There can be duplicate SSNs due to name changes of an individual, that’s the easiest answer. In general, it’s common to just add a new record in cases where a person’s information changes so you can retain the old record(s) and thus have a history for a person (look up Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)). That’s how the SSA is able to figure out if a person changed their gender, they just look up that information using the same SSN and see if the gender in the new application is different from the old data.
Another accusation Elon made was that payments are going to people missing SSNs. The best explanation I have for that is that various state departments have their own on-premise databases and their own structure and design that do not necessarily mirror the federal master database. There are likely some databases where the SSN field is setup to accept strings only, since in real life, your SSN on your card actually has dashes, those dashes make the number into a string. If the SSN is stored as a string in a state database, then when it’s brought over to the federal database (assuming the federal db is using a number field instead of text), there can be some data loss, resulting in a NULL.
The ignorance of Elon is truly concerning, but somehow the worst part to me is Elon calling someone a retard for pointing that out.
He called a rescuer a pedophile for trying to rescue children…
Ableist, racist white supremacist doing their ableist-racist-white-supremacist thing.
To me I’m not really sure what his reply even means. I think it’s some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:
Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn’t use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.
Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn’t use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon’s ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it’s really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.
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.
TL;DR de-deuplication in that form is used to refer a technique where you reference two different pieces of data in the file system, with one single piece of data on the drive, the intention being to optimize file storage size, and minimize fragmentation.
You can imagine this would be very useful when taking backups for instance, we call this a “Copy on Write” approach, since generally it works by copying the existing file to a second reference point, where you can then add an edit on top of the original file, while retaining 100% of the original file size, and both copies of the file (its more complicated than this obviously, but you get the idea)
now just to be clear, if you did implement this into a DB, which you could do fairly trivially, this would change nothing about how the DB operates, it wouldn’t remove “duplicates” it would only coalesce duplicate data into one single tree to optimize disk usage. I have no clue what elon thinks it does.
The problem here, as a non programmer, is that i don’t understand why you would ever de-duplicate a database. Maybe there’s a reason to do it, but i genuinely cannot think of a single instance where you would want to delete one entry, and replace it with a reference to another, or what elon is implying here (remove “duplicate” entries, however that’s supposed to work)
Elon doesn’t know what “de-duplication” is, and i don’t know why you would ever want that in a DB, seems like a really good way to explode everything,
i genuinely cannot think of a single instance where you would want to delete one entry, and replace it with a reference to another
Well, there’s not always a benefit to keeping historical data. Sometimes you only want the most up-to-date information in a particular table or database, so you’d just update the row (replace). It depends on the use case of a given table.
what elon is implying here (remove “duplicate” entries, however that’s supposed to work)
Elon believes that each row in a table should be unique based on the SSN only, so a given SSN should appear only once with the person’s name and details on it. Yes, it’s an extremely dumb idea, but he’s a famously stupid person.
Well, there’s not always a benefit to keeping historical data. Sometimes you only want the most up-to-date information in a particular table or database, so you’d just update the row (replace). It depends on the use case of a given table.
in this case you would just overwrite the existing row, you wouldn’t use de-duplication because it would do the opposite of what you wanted in that case. Maybe even use historical backups or CoW to retain that kind of data.
Elon believes that each row in a table should be unique based on the SSN only, so a given SSN should appear only once with the person’s name and details on it. Yes, it’s an extremely dumb idea, but he’s a famously stupid person.
and naturally, he doesn’t know what the term “de-duplication” means. Definitionally, the actual identity of the person MUST be unique, otherwise you’re going to somehow return two rows, when you call one, which is functionally impossible given how a DB is designed.
Ssn being unique isnt a dumb idea, its a very smart idea, but due to the us ssn format its impossible to do. Hence to implement the idea you need to change the ssn format so it is unique before then.
Also, elons remark is stupid as is. Im sure the row has a unique id, even if its just a rowid column.
Also, elons remark is stupid as is. Im sure the row has a unique id, even if its just a rowid column.
even then, i wonder if there’s some sort of “row hash function” that takes a hash of all the data in a single entry, and generates a universally unique hash of that entry, as a form of “global id”
He’s just a permanent petulant child.
