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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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean it matters here, as it's literally the topic being actively discussed by the person who literally asked, so obviously it matters to them lol
The thing is, there are a large number of different reasons to store an SSN as a long int or a string depending on how it is used with the rest of the data. For a phone number, there can be a valid reason to store the area code separately to speed up data queries that narrow down by area code instead of all in one field and peeling it apart. There are also reasons to have additional, seemingly redundant, columns that can be used for optimizing searches or simplifying how queries are written.
A common one is that using 1 and 0 instead of Y an N is often faster for massively large dataset optimization, but isn't as easily human readable.
There are complex reasons for choosing different approaches in a database, and the most important thing is generally consistency within the database. His point is meaningless without context beyond consistency, and the different government systems will have had different priorities, not to mention trying to update all of the databases to make them consistent is a MASSIVE fucking undertaking. And the systems can stay the way they are as long as they have APIs or other methods of transferring data that ARE normalized and consistent.
I have personally been working with reporting data to federal systems for 15 years as a semi knowledgeable technical person. This is what I do for a job. What he is saying is pointlessly small trivia used to justify tearing things down instead of improving them.
They weren't justifying anything or making a moral statement, they were just discussing the technical question that was posed.