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.

  • valtia@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.

    • DacoTaco@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Ssn being unique isnt a dump 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.