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21 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 12 Feb \ on: The government doesn't use SQL (or Elon has never used SQL) devs
Maybe I'm dense but what is the relationship between duped SSNs and not knowing SQL?
It's a fundamental property of SQL (and data engineering more general tbh) that when you want to query data (especially but not exclusively with joins) you can get multiple rows per one primary key.
Example: If @SimpleStacker ate an apple and a banana today SQL wouldn't say "SimpleStacker; Apple, Banana", instead it would say
| Person | Food | Quantity |
|---|---|---|
| SimpleStacker | Apple | 1 |
| SimpleStacker | Banana | 1 |
Notice how the primary key "SimpleStacker" appeared twice
From this we CANNOT say for sure if Elon is missinterpreting how SQL works or if the goverment has broken data.
What I find interesting here is how Elon uses all the words ("database", "de-duplicated") like someone who doesn't understand SQL but at the same time he built Zip2 and Tesla, making it unthinkable that he doesn't know how SQL work.
Maybe his account is also partially run by an intern, who knows
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I thought a simple interpretation of his statement was simply that in whatever database he's referring to, there's no table in which SSN is the primary key. That is, it's not a primary key at all and multiple people can have the same SSN by design. Maybe I'm missing some context from the whole thread, but from just the screenshot I can't see why this implies Elon doesn't know SQL.
It is as you say, it's almost impossible that he doesn't know how SQL works...