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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.
As a data engineer for the past 20+ years: There is absolutely no fucking way that the us gov doesnt use sql. This is what shows that he’s stupid not only in sql but in data science in general.
Regarding duplications: its more nuanced than those statements each side put. There can be duplications in certain situations. In some situations there shouldnt be. And I dont really see how duplications in a db is open to fraud.
Well we heard what the Whitehouse press secretary has to say about the fraud they found 2 days ago. They found massive amounts and she brought receipts! All of them were examples of money being spent that disagree with Trump's new policies. Like money spent on DEI initiatives and aid sent to countries in Africa to help slow the spread of HIV. That receipt was for a laughable $57,000.
Then when asked how any of it was fraud she said, well they consider that fraud because it wasn't used to help Americans.
So the 27 year old married to a billionaire 32 years older than her is complaining that the money wasnt directly spent on her gold digging ass, and if it's not spent directly on her, it's fraud.
Biggest disgrace of a government that has ever existed.
Musk's statement about the government not using SQL is false. I worked for FEMA for fourteen years, a decade of which was as a Reports Analyst. I wrote Oracle SQL+ code to pull data from a database and put it into spreadsheets. I know, I know. You're shocked that Elon Musk is wrong. Please remain calm.
I work for a crown corp in Canada we have, off the top of my head, about 800 MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, Postgres databases across the org (I manage our CMDB). Musk is a retard. The world runs on SQL.
He wouldn't know this though because he's a techbro that builds apps with MongoDB b cause he doesn't understand what normalizing data is and why SQL is the best option for 99.9999999% of applications.
Fucking idiots.
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.
Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
It’s so basic that documentation is completely unnecessary.
“De-duping” could mean multiple things, depending on what you mean by “duplicate”.
It could mean that the entire row of some table is the same. But that has nothing to do with the kind of fraud he’s talking about. Two people with the same SSN but different names wouldn’t be duplicates by that definition, so “de-duping” wouldn’t remove it.
It can also mean that a certain value shows up more than once (eg just the SSN). But that’s something you often want in database systems. A transaction log of SSN contributions would likely have that SSN repeated hundreds of times. It has nothing to do with fraud, it’s just how you record that the same account has multiple contributions.
A database system as large as the SSA has needs to deal with all kinds of variations in data (misspellings, abbreviations, moves, siblings, common names, etc). Something as simplistic as “no dupes anywhere” would break immediately.
SSN is also not a valid unique key, there have been situations with multiple people issued the same SSN:
Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.
The main components would probably be:
There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.
Because of course the government uses SQL. It's as stupid as saying the government doesn't use electricity or something equally stupid. The government is myriad agencies running myriad programs on myriad hardware with myriad people. My damned computers at home are using at least 2-3 SQL databases for some of the programs I run.
SQL is damn near everywhere where data sets are found.
Its because the comments he made are inconsistent with common conventions in data engineering.
Basically what he said is ~~incoherent~~ inconsistent with typical practices among data engineers ~~to anybody who has worked with larger data.~~
In terms of using SQL, it's basically just a more reliable and better Excel that doesn't come with a default GUI.
If you need to store data, It's almost always best throw it into a SQLite database Because it keeps it structured. It's standardised and it can be used from any programming language.
However, many people use excel because they don't have experience with programming languages.
Get chatGpt to help you write a PyQT GUI for a SQLite database and I think you would develop a high level understanding for how the pieces fit together
Edit: @zalgotext made a good point.
Great explanation, but I have a tiny, tiny, minor nit-pick
Basically what he said is incoherent to anybody who has worked with larger data.
I'm being pedantic, but I disagree with your wording. As a backend dev, I work with relational databases a ton, and what Musk said wasn't incomprehensible to me, it just sounded like something a first year engineer fresh out of college would say.
Again, the rest of your explanation is spot on, absolutely no notes, but I do think the distinction between "adult making up incomprehensible bullshit" and "adult cosplaying as a baby engineer who thinks he's hot shit but doesn't know anything beyond surface level stuff" is important.
Having never seen the database schema myself, my read is that the SSN is used as a primary key in one table, and many other tables likely use that as a foreign key. He probably doesn't understand that foreign keys are used as links and should not be de-duplicated, as that breaks the key relationship in a relational database. As others have mentioned, even in the main table there are probably reused or updated SSNs that would then be multiple rows that have timestamps and/or Boolean flags for current/expired.
Is this is true, then by this time we are all fucked. Like Monday someone checks their banking or retirement and it all gone. That's gonna be a crazy day.
I hope they're not using the actual SSN as the primary key. I hope its a big ass number that is otherwise unrelated.
It's an insanely idiotic thing to say. Federal government IT is myriad, and done at a per agency level. Any relational database system, which the federal government uses plenty of, uses SQL in one way or another. Elon doesn't know what he is talking about at all, and is being an ultimate idiot about this. Even in the context of mainframe projects thatif we are giving elong the benefit of doubt about referring to, most COBOL shoprbibknow have adapted to addressing internal data records using an SQL interface, although obviously in that legacy world it is insanely fractured and arcane.
Yeah, obviously ol' boy is tripping if he thinks SQL isn't used in the government.
Big thing I'm prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database (thus showing the First Bro doesn't understand how SQL works).
Well, if someone changes their name you'd add a new record with the same SSN to hold their new name, that way it keeps the records consistent with the paperwork; old papers say their old name and reference the retired record, new papers use their new name and reference the new record.
You can use the SSN as the key to find all records associated with a person, it doesn't have to be a single row per SSN, in fact that would make the data harder to manage and less accurate.
E.g. if someone changes their last name after getting married, it could be useful to be able to have their current and former name in the database for reference.
It's more than just SQL. Social Security Numbers can be re-used over time. It is not a unique identifier by itself.
The US government pays lots of money to Oracle to use their database. And it's not for BerkleyDB either. (Poor sleepy cat). Oracle provides them support for their relational databases... and those databases use... SQL.
Now if Musk tries to end the Oracle contracts, then Oracle's lawyers will go after his lawyers and I'm a gonna get me some popcorn. (But we all know that won't happen in any timeline... Elon gotta keep Larry happy.)
He is saying the US government doesn't use structured databases.
At least 90% of all databases have a structure.
The ignorance of Elon is truly concerning, but somehow the worst part to me is Elon calling someone a retard for pointing that out.
Ableist, racist white supremacist doing their ableist-racist-white-supremacist thing.
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,
How come republicans keep saying that doggy is going to expose all the fraud in the government but yet the biggest fraud with 37 felonies is president? What the actual fuck to these people think?
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.
139 comments and no one addresses his use of a slur.
Because that's really just to be expected at this point, and what his audience would want..
Better to focus on constantly poking at him for being dumb, which he and his fans hate, rather than give them what they want, ie being upset at their hateful language
Everything they don't understand (which is nearly everything) is either God or fraud. Do with that information what you will.
Billionaires are stealing our dollars, tax or otherwise.
If there are timestamped records for things like name changes then you'd get "duped" SSNs
I'm still learning SQL, so if I'm out of line someone please correct me, but, the gist of it, is that SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language used in pretty much all relational databases, which with something like the Social Security database is almost guaranteed. Having duplicates of information in a relational database is not a sign of fraud, or anything shady going on.
When you're born, your name, along with your SSN and any other relevant info is put into the database, later in life, say you change your name, the original name, along with your SSN will stay there, and a new line in the database would be added with your new name, along with your SSN again (a duplicate) that way the database has a reference point between old and new name, and keeps all your information lined up between the two.
If you were to get rid of all of that duplicate information, anyone who's ever had a name change, been married, etc. It will cause chaos in the database, with hundreds of millions of entries that now have no relation to anything, and are now just basically dead ends.