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.
Because SQL is everywhere. If Musk knew what it was, he would know that the government absolutely does use it.
This explanation makes no sense in the context of OP’s question, given the order of comments…
Yeah, a better explanation is that Deduplicating Databases are an absolutely terrible idea for every use case, as it means deleting history from the database.
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.
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.
JFC: married individuals, or divorced and name change back, would be totally fucked. Just on the very surface is his fuckery.
Hypothetically you could have a separate “previous names” table where you keep the previous names and on the main table you only keep the current name. There are a lot of ways to design a db to not unnecessarily duplicate SSNs, but without knowing the implementation it’s hard to say how wrong Musk is. But it’s obvious he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because we know that due to human error SSN-s are not unique and you can’t enforce uniqueness on SSN-s without completely fucking up the system. Complaining about it the way he did indicates that he doesn’t really understand why things are the way they are.
Another accusation Elon made was that payments are going to people missing SSNs.
A much simpler answer is thatnot all Americans actually have an SSN. The Amish for example have religious objections towards insurance, so they were allowed to opt out from social security and therefore don’t get an SSN.It’s true that some Americans don’t have Social Security numbers, but those Americans can’t collect Social Security benefits unless/until they get one.
My bad, I thought it was about payments in general (including other programs) but it says social security database. Sorry.
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.
A given SSN appearing in multiple tables actually makes sense. To someone not familiar with SQL (i.e. at about my level of understanding), I could see that being misinterpreted as having multiple SSN repeated “in the database”.
Of all the comments ao far, I find yours the most compelling.
Theoretically, yeah, that’s one solution. The more reasonable thing to do would be to use the foreign key though. So, for example:
SSN_Table
ID | SSN | Other info
Other_Table
ID | SSN_ID | Other info
When you want to connect them to have both sets of info, it’d be the following:
SELECT * FROM SSN_Table JOIN Other_Table ON SSN_Table.ID = Other_Table.SSN_ID
EDIT: Oh, just to clear up any confusion, the SSN_ID in this simple example is not the SSN itself. To access that in this example query, it’d by SSN_Table.SSN
Yeah, databases are complicated and make my head hurt. Glancing through resources from other comments, I’m realizing I know next to nothing about database optimization. Like, my gut reaction to your comment is that it seems like unnecessary overhead to have that data across two tables - but if one sub-dept didn’t need access to the raw SSN, but did need access to less personal data, j could see those stored in separate tables.
But anyway, you’re helping clear things up for me. I really appreciate the pseudo code level example.
It’s necessary to split it out into different tables if you have a one-to-many relationship. Let’s say you have a list of driver licenses the person has had over the years, for example. Then you’d need the second table. So something like this:
SSN_Table
ID | SSN | Other info
Driver_License_Table
ID | SSN_ID | Issue_Date | Expiry_Date | Other_Info
Then you could do something like pull up a person’s latest driver’s license, or list all the ones they had, or pull up the SSN associated with that license.
I think a likely scenario would be for name changes, such as taking your partner’s surname after marriage.
This is true, but there are many instances where denormalization makes sense and is frequently used.
A common example is a table that is frequently read. Instead of going to the “central” table the data is denormalized for faster access. This is completely standard practice for every large system.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it can be easily misused. With SSN, I’d think the most stupid thing to do is to use it as the primary key. The second one would be to ignore the security risks that are ingrained in an SSN. The federal government, being large as it is, I’m sure has instances of both, however since Musky is using his possy of young, arrogant brogrammers, I’m positively certain they’re completely ignoring the security aspect.
Yeah, no one appreciates security.
I probably overused that saying to explain it: ‘if theres no break ins, why do we pay for security? Oh, there was a break in - what do we even pay security for?’
To be a bit more generic here, when you’re at government scale you’re generally deep in trade-off territory. Time and space are frequently opposed values and you have to choose which one is most important, and consider the expenses of both.
E.g. caching is duplicating data to save time. Without it we’d have lower storage costs, but longer wait times and more network traffic.
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.
- One has the whole thing as a long int: 222333444
- One has the whole thing as a string: 2223334444 (which of course can’t be directly compared to the one that is a long int…)
- One has separate fields for area code and the rest with a hyphen: 222 and 333-4444
- One has the whole thing with parenthesis, a space, and a hyphen as a string: (222) 333-4444
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.
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.
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).
It doesn’t matter without scope. Are we looking at a database of SSNs? tax records? A sign in log? The social security number database might require uniques in some way, but tax records could be the same person over multiple years. A sign in gives a unique identifier but you could be signing in every day.
It’s like saying a car VIN shows up multiple times in a database. Where? What database? Was it sold? Tickets? Registered every year?
This is nothing more than a “assume I mean immigrants or tax fraud and get mad!” inflammatory statement with no proof or reason.
If it’s used as an identifier to link together rows from different tables. Also known as “joining” tables. SSN (with birthdate) is a unique identifier, and so it’s natural to choose as a primary/foreign key.
It really is baffling trying to make sense of what he is saying. It’s like the only explanation that makes any sense at all is that he has no idea what he is talking about. Even if he knew just cursory knowledge about database cardinality you wouldn’t say stuff so stupid.
If he doesn’t think the government uses sql after having his goons break into multiple government servers he is an idiot.
If he is lying to cover his ass for fucking up so many things (the more likely explanation) then saying “he never used sql” is basically a dig at how technically inept he really is despite bragging about being a tech bro.
deleted by creator
Why would one person, one SSN ever have two different birth dates? That sounds like an issue all onto itself.
He is saying the US government doesn’t use structured databases.
At least 90% of all databases have a structure.
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).
As someone explained in another comment, you often duplicate information due to rules around cardinality to gain improvements in retrieval an. structure. I would be pretty worried if SSSNs were being used as a a widepread primary key in any set of tables - those should generally be UUIDs that can be optimized for gashing while avoiding collisions.
Even if we are being generous to Elon, we could assume that social security payments are processed on mainframes given how many have to go out and the legacy nature of the program. Most mainframe shops I know have adapted an SQL interface for records in some capacity, but who knows what he is looking at.
Government federal IT is done at a per agency basis. I would say oracle database is pretty much the most licensed piece of software the government does use outside of Redhat Linux and windows desktop.
Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
100%
What’s fascinating is you can take pretty much ANY topic, beside scamming at scale because there he truly is a master, you have some knowledge about and see very fast that he has no fucking clue. From engineering to video game, the guy has no idea. Sure his entourage, paid or not, might actually be World expert about said topic, but not him. So obvious.
“The government” is multiple agencies and departments. There is no single computer system, database, mainframe, or file store that the entire US goverment uses. There is no standard programming language used. There is no standard server configuration. Each agency is different. Each software project is different.
When someone says the government doesn’t use sql, they don’t know what they are talking about. It could be refering to the fact that many government systems are ancient mainframe applications that store everything in vsam. But it is patently false that the government doesn’t use sql. I’ve been on a number of government contracts over the years, spanning multiple agencies. MsSQL was used in all but one.
Furthermore, some people share SSNs, they are not unique. It’s a common misconception that they are, but anyone working on a government software learns this pretty quickly. The fact that it seems to be a big shock goes to show that he doesn’t know what he is doing and neither do the people reporting to him.
Not only is he failing to understand the technology, he is failing to understand the underlying data he is looking at.
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 Vice Bro doesn’t understand how SQL works).
I’m not aware of any instance where two people share an SSN though. The Social Security Administration even goes as far as to say they don’t recycle the SSNs of dead people (its linked a couple times in other comments and Voyager doesn’t let me save drafts of comments, I’ll make an edit to this comment with that link for you).
Can you point me to somewhere showing multiple people can share an SSN?
Edit: as promised: The Social Security FAQ page
My wife has a tax payment history under two different legal names which share a single SSN
Hmmm, well I can’t speak to how the actual databases are put together, so maybe they would have that as two separate unique primary keys with a duplicated SSN.
But it really seems like bad design if they out it together that way…
Worth noting is that “good” database design evolved over time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization). If anything was setup pre-1970s, they wouldn’t have even had the conception of the normal forms used to cut down on data duplication. And even after they were defined, it would have been quite a while before the concepts trickled down from acedmemia to the engineers actually setting up the databases in production.
On top of that, name to SSN is a many-to-many relationship - a single person can legally change their name, and may have to apply for a new SSN (e.g. in the case of identity theft). So even in a well normalized database, when you query the data in a “useful” form (e.g. results include name and SSN), it’s probably going to appear as if there are multiple people using the same SSN, as well as multiple SSNs assigned to the same person.
Assuming the whole “duplicate SSN” thing isn’t just a complete fabrication, we have no idea what table he was even looking at! A table of transactions e.g. would have a huge number of duplicate SSNs.
The fact that SSN aren’t singular identifiers has been public knowledge for quite a while. ID analytics has shown in over a decade of studies that some people have multiple SSN attached to their name, while some (over five million) SSN are used by three or more living individuals. If you search “ID analytics SSN” you’ll find loads of articles reporting on this dating back to 2010 and a bit before.
Was trying to find something from the SSA itself on the topic, but didn’t turn anything useful up on the quick.
Here is a link for the lazy on the topic: https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6C10406347
This is from 15 years ago, so I don’t know how much has changed since then. But this sounds like the sort of thing they mean.
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/odds-someone-else-has-your-ssn-one-7-6c10406347
I mean I don’t know a ton about SQL but one thing to keep in mind about SSNs is they were not originally meant to be used for identification but because we have no form of national id and places still needed a way to verify who you are people just started using SSNs for that since it’s something everyone has and there wasn’t really a better option. So now the government has been having to try and make them work for that and make them more secure. The better solution would be to make some form of national id that is designed to be secure but Republicans and people like Musk would probably call that government overreach or a way to spy and track people.
I’d imagine the numbers of dead people eventually get cycled around to. 9 digits only gives you 999,999,999 people to go through, and we have over a third of that in existence right now.
working on government software
FTFY
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.
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).
As a former DOD contractor I can also confirm we built whole platforms that use Oracle (shudder) SQL
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.
I think a lot of comments here miss the mark, it’s not really just about stating the gov does not use SQL or speculation regarding keys.
Deduplication is generally part of a compression strategy and has nothing to do with SQL. If we’re being generous he may have been talking about normalization, but no one I have ever met has confused the two terms (they are distinctly different from an engineering perspective).
There are degrees of normalization too, so it may make total sense to normalize 3NF (third normal form) rather than say 6NF depending on the data.
Its because the comments he made are inconsistent with common conventions in data engineering.
- It is very common not to deduplicate data and instead just append rows, The current value is the most recent and all the old ones are simply historical. That way you don’t risk losing data and you have an entire history.
- whilst you could do some trickery to deduplicate the data it does create more complexity. There’s an old saying with ZFS: “Friends don’t let friends dedupe” And it’s much the same here.
- compression is usually good enough. It will catch duplicated data and deal with it in a fairly efficient way, not as efficient as deduplication but it’s probably fine and it’s definitely a lot simpler
- Claiming the government does not use SQL
- It’s possible they have rolled their own solution or they are using MongoDB Or something but this would be unlikely and wouldn’t really refute the initial claim
- I believe many other commenters noted that it probably is MySQL anyway.
Basically what he said is
incoherentinconsistent with typical practices among data engineersto 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.
There’s an old saying with ZFS: “Friends don’t let friends dedupe”
That’s a bad example to reference. The ZFS implementation of deduplication is poorly thought out, and I say that even though I like and run ZFS on my own Linux server(s). I understand that the BTRFS implementation of dedupe works well (no first-hand experience), and the Windows one works great (first-hand experience).
I’ve had a poor experience with btrfs dedupe tbh (and a terrible experience with qgroups), however, this was years ago. Btrfs snapshots I prefer though, much easier not to have that dependence.
What distro are you using for ZFS, void?
It was a great answer until the very last sentence. ChatGPT is never a reference for anything ever if you have any fraction of a brain.
I disagree, it’s just a tool. It’s a fantastic way to template applications very quickly, particularly for those who are not already familiar with technologies and may not have the time or opportunity to play around with things otherwise.
Llm is not a search engine and it can produce awful code. This is not production code, it’s for tinkering. As a sandbox tool, LLMs are fantastic.
On the ethical side of things, yeah openAI sucks, Qwen2.5 would be up to this task, one can run that locally.
I have a fraction of a brain, I think, and use ChatGPT as a guide so that I have something to start with. Even if it’s slightly off, my two brain cells can pick it out and go from there. It’s not so bad.
And you know, I get it if you don’t like AI, but let’s be honest about it at the very least.
To be honest it’s a shit solution that makes you worse by merely using it.
I mostly ask it things I don’t know, though. I’m not exporting my thinking to it.
I ask it difficult translations, how to code something I’m unfamiliar with, help with grammar, i use it as an OCR for other languages, to help me remember things I can’t directly search, etc. I have a hard time believing all use is detrimental, especially when you’re filling in the gaps of your knowledge and a best guess will do. It’s surely better than a web search for things you don’t even know how to write in a search box.
You sound like common sense and the other person sounds like they have an axe to grind.
I mostly ask it things I don’t know, though. I’m not exporting my thinking to it.
Exhibit A
Which are then obviously confirmed with a web search. Jesus, spare me the cynicism.
And I’m just going to say this as a general observation, but the user base of the fediverse is pretty sophisticated at this time to be assuming shit like this. You make this place hostile by not giving the benefit of the doubt, you know. And even then. How hard is it to not think the worst of everyone you come across online? So ridiculous and petty.
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.
Fair point, I’ve edited the answer to be clearer for future readers.
- It is very common not to deduplicate data and instead just append rows, The current value is the most recent and all the old ones are simply historical. That way you don’t risk losing data and you have an entire history.
Clearly the solution is to just use a big Excel spreadsheet.
In our company I’m friends with one of the lead devs. He once told me “no matter what way you look at it, excel is never the answer” lol I’m sure he was a bit biased, but I’ve seen my fair share of macro-ridden abominations over the years
It makes a pretty good calculator. 🧮
It’s an amazing tool if only one person is updating / maintaining the file. The moment collaboration starts, you’re all fucked. I’m currently maintaining one that I inherited that is at least 10 years old and comes with a 50 page instruction manual on how to run it every month… that then gets posted to a shared drive where anyone can edit.
And then the rest of the month is spent explaining to the end users how they fucked it up this time.
On the flip side, I’ve also built sheets that could parse data between Nav, MySQL, and SQL ERP systems with tables of over 5million rows each on a single button refresh that ran flawlessly for years… because I was the only maintainer and the sheets were locked from accepting changes from other users.
Excel is accounting workbook software, it is not suitable for data storage. Although people certainly use it that way.
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.)
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).
Big thing I’m prying at is whether there would be a legitimate purpose to have duplicated SSNs in the database
formally, changing the identity of someone would have a very explicit reason to keep a “duplicate” ssn entry, if purely for historical reasons for example. I’m sure there are a myriad of technical reasons to be doing this.
