this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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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.

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[–] SloppyPuppy 60 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

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[–] Generica 53 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] jve 7 points 6 days ago

As a former DOD contractor I can also confirm we built whole platforms that use Oracle (shudder) SQL

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[–] valtia 28 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] DarthKaren 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

JFC: married individuals, or divorced and name change back, would be totally fucked. Just on the very surface is his fuckery.

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[–] ThePowerOfGeek 47 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Elon Musk is the walking talking embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] MathiasTCK 9 points 5 days ago (4 children)

SSN is also not a valid unique key, there have been situations with multiple people issued the same SSN:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Yeah. And the fix for that has nothing to do with "de-duping" as a database operation either.

The main components would probably be:

  1. Decide on a new scheme (with more digits)
  2. Create a mapping from the old scheme to the new scheme. (that's where existing duplicates would get removed)
  3. Let people use both during some transition period, after which the old one isn't valid any more.
  4. Decide when you're going to stop issuing old SSNs and only issue new ones to people born after some date.

There's a lot of complication in each of those steps but none of them are particularly dependant on "de-duped" databases.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] werefreeatlast 5 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Another commentor pointed out a legitimate use case, but it's not even worth thinking about that much. De-duplocated is usually a word you use in data science to talk aboutakong sure your dataset is "hygienic" and that you aren't duplicating data points. A database is much different because it is less about representing data, and more about storing it in a way that allows you to perform transactions at scale - retrieval, storage, modification, etc. Relational databases are analyzed in terms of data cardinality which essentially describes tradeoffs in representation between speed of retrieval (duplications good) vs storage efficiency (duplications bad).

The issue is that Elon is so vague and so off the mark that it is very hard to believe that he even has the first clue about what he is a talking about. Even you are confused just by reading it. It is all a tactic to convince others that he is smarter than he is while doing extreme damage to the hardworking people that actually make this stuff possible. Have you noticed that the man has never come to a conclusion that wasn't in his interests? This is not honest intellectualism, or discussion based on technical merit. It's self serving propaganda.

[–] RabbitBBQ 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (5 children)

It's more than just SQL. Social Security Numbers can be re-used over time. It is not a unique identifier by itself.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago (2 children)

He is saying the US government doesn't use structured databases.

At least 90% of all databases have a structure.

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[–] CodeHead 18 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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.)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago (2 children)

The ignorance of Elon is truly concerning, but somehow the worst part to me is Elon calling someone a retard for pointing that out.

[–] dustyData 9 points 6 days ago

Ableist, racist white supremacist doing their ableist-racist-white-supremacist thing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

He called a rescuer a pedophile for trying to rescue children...

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (6 children)

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,

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[–] rational_lib 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)

139 comments and no one addresses his use of a slur.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago

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

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[–] SocialMediaRefugee 7 points 5 days ago

Billionaires are stealing our dollars, tax or otherwise.

[–] SocialMediaRefugee 6 points 5 days ago

If there are timestamped records for things like name changes then you'd get "duped" SSNs

[–] TehWorld 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Clearly the solution is to just use a big Excel spreadsheet.

[–] valkyre09 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago

Excel is accounting workbook software, it is not suitable for data storage. Although people certainly use it that way.

[–] TehWorld 7 points 6 days ago

It makes a pretty good calculator. 🧮

[–] arotrios 7 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] Kalkarino 6 points 6 days ago

It doesn’t matter anymore to the trumpers. They are eating this shit up like it’s thanksgiving

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