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.
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.