6 ms·
DOGE employees don't understand the basics of SQL
- carabiner 2y agoIt could be that, a big misunderstanding of normal database design, or it could be a legit error. No one has offered direct evidence of either case. What I'll say is that working in legacy industries with legacy data, all bets are off as to whether anything is well posed. My first company's "database" was a folder of 100 excel files. OP is making a massive assumption that the federal government is using modern SQL database design principles in this specific application, or a modern database at all.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI assure you various bits of the US government use SQL databases.
- bolognafairy 2y agoThat’s not what they were saying though. I don’t think anyone is taking the other side of that bet. Like, no shit?
- carabiner 2y agoin this specific application
- ceejayoz 2y agoThis specific application looks pretty likely to use SQL. https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/financials/25a/fausf/manage-treasury-account-symbols.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/financials/25a/fausf/m... https://www.usaspending.gov/federal-spending-guide https://www.usaspending.gov/federal-spending-guide > The USAspending SQL Database Downloads page includes instructions and links to help download snapshots of the USAspending database as a PostgreSQL archive. This resource is intended for advanced users. The full database is over 1.5 terabytes and will continue to increase in size. The process to complete a full database restore can take many hours to complete.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoI've seen about a dozen of these "GOTCHA!" posts in the past few days, ranging from COBOL epochs to SQL types and queries to FoxPro internals to "it's all on paper in a cavern". People are desperate to have something shiny to show off to their friends and in most cases, they're really not concerned if it's true or not, just that it's plausible enough to gain social cred. In the end, it accomplishes nothing when it comes to the actual functioning of DOGE but I'm sure there are lots of up votes gained.
- carabiner 2y agoMost of all I haven't seen any of the federal employees working directly on this application backing up this "billionaire dumb" speculation. They all hate Musk and haven't been shy about bashing him for other reasons; why aren't they jumping on this?
- ceejayoz 2y agoAh, yes, the very safe endeavor of publicly criticizing a group of powerful people known for open revenge on their critics. I’m sure folks are lining up to be the first. As Morgan Freeman put it in The Dark Knight: Lucius Fox: [to Reese] Let me get this straight, you think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person? [Reese's face falls and Fox smiles] Lucius Fox: Good luck.
- carabiner 2y ago> Ah, yes, the very safe endeavor of publicly criticizing a group of powerful people known for open revenge on their critics. I’m sure folks are lining up to be the first. They are. There are endless tweets about this bashing him. Pics of park rangers, wildland firefighter losing their jobs and blaming trump publicly. People resigning because of it. Like I said: > They all hate Musk and haven't been shy about bashing him for other reasons; why aren't they jumping on this? And then you quote a comic book movie? What's next, quote the Matrix or something?
- andyst 2y agoWhen seeing the approach to how Elon/DOGE applied themselves to air traffic control after the incidents, I'm not falling into the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This group is just incompetent and going to re-learn all the mistakes within each domain that led to industry getting to where it has through a series of hard won lessons.
- staplers 2y agogoing to re-learn all the mistakes One would hope so.. they've already begun blaming things like "DEI" so I find it unlikely. It will probably be decades (if ever) before the lessons are relearned and implemented.
- craigus 2y agoExactly, just like SpaceX did in launch vehicles, and Tesla did in car manufacturing.
- dave1999x 2y agoDon't forget these are just Elon purchases, which he's owned a lot longer than a 4 year presidential term.
- sepositus 2y agoI'm glad I don't work with this guy. I've had co-workers who routinely talk to me in this way, treating me as an infant so they could feel superior. I wonder if he'll regret this post going viral.
- ranger_danger 2y ago"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding."
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoMusk isn't sending his best and brightest to the frontline. The DOGE bros are legal cannon fodder. The mission must be to stop them first--it's why we spread the power to issue arrest warrants across the feds, states and even municipalities.
- sepositus 2y agoI'm simply saying that this form of communication isn't helpful and often has the opposite effect. Anyone working in an office environment who has had someone talk to them like this would agree (unless they have a fetish of being infantilized?). Outing yourself as someone who engages in it on such a public platform probably won't come without professional consequences. I mean, happy to hear counter-arguments that this style is actually the most effective. Maybe I'm crazy in thinking I wouldn't hire this guy into my team after seeing this interaction.
- TransAtlToonz 2y agoA sledgehammer doesn't need to be able to turn a screw. Perhaps states might take advantage of this, but the incompetency of toadies at technology won't impact their competency at wreaking destruction.
- werdnapk 2y agoJust wait until they come across some mainframes and need to figure out JCL.
- parshimers 2y agoi think this already happened to some extent, with the Social Security Administration. unless something's changed it's all stored in IMS, i.e. pre-relational. perhaps there's some relational view on top of it but to my knowledge it hasn't been overhauled to anything more modern.
- shireboy 2y agoMy read of this post is it's just this guy's word vs doge's. Doge says they allow nulls for TAS, author says they don't. I'm pretty sure in the author's example, though, the payment _could_ be created with a NULL vendor, as I'm pretty sure NULLABLE is default for int in PostgresSQL. Depending on the scenario, this may be "bad" or it may be intentional. What would really matter is "does the system actually transfer funds or cut checks without a TAS". In ERPs I work with, a payment without a vendor is allowed in a draft state, but to get an actual check, you need a vendor.
- hecanjog 2y ago> I'm pretty sure NULLABLE is default for int in PostgresSQL It's not the default...
- palmotea 2y agoQ: Elon Musk, What did you get done this week? A: Demonstrated my "crack" team is incompetent and lacks basic skills. Also broke a lot of stuff.
- ahwelitif 2y agoThere's so much partisan noise about DOGE going around -- At this point, I don't know what to believe anymore. Elon lies constantly, abuses employees, backstabs partners, and is probably a racist; At the same time, his companies have created seemingly impossible/fantastic technologies/tools that have changed the world forever. Is DOGE a genuine effort at desperately needed reforms to save America from bankruptcy? Is it a secret plot to take full control of the federal government like a dictator's coup? Is it a mix of both at the same time (ie; recent Saudi and Chinese 'anti-corruption' campaigns)? What should I believe?
- soulofmischief 2y agoYou should believe what your eyes and ears tell you, after corroborating multiple sources and reading accounts of or speaking with people who have been directly affected by what's happening. Read Project 2025, the playbook is out in the open. All of this is going to require critical thinking skills and unfortunately you can't gain that by reading tips. Assuming you do gave critical thinking skills, it's pretty clear what's taking place and that soft truths are often used to hide deep lies.
- scarface_74 2y agoWhat “impossible goals”? It’s easy just to randomly fire people, act illegally and not to think of the downstream consequences. Any private CEO would have his head handed to him by handling things do ham fistedly
- ahwelitif 2y agoI edited my comment to be more clear. As an ethnically Syrian person, Elon Musk has posted enraging racist epithets about me every single day on his Twitter. I strongly dislike him as a person for his firehose of slander against helpless refugees who aren't so privileged/fortunate as me. Look at how he is speaking towards poor Ukraine! Despite this, his companies have without a doubt changed the world. His investments into e-banking, reusable rockets, mass market EVs, ChatGPT, Starlink, green energy, etc. sound like something from a comic book into how outsized an impact they make.
- Clubber 2y agoIn this tweet, Elon Musk (and DOGE?) have come to the conclusion that $4.7T in spending was blank, "making traceability almost impossible." This is because the TAS is used in many tables, and is used as a primary key in others tables using a foreign key constraint. What his team has seemingly uncovered is not waste. It's a little thing I like to call, "Extremely routine database architecture." This maintains referential integrity between the two tables. It works exactly the same way with TAS in the IRS database. I checked for myself. It's not optional. The last sentence, "It's not optional," is the crux of the argument. When he says it's not optional, I assume he means the payment.vendor_id FK is defined as NOT NULL. When doing exports like he is referencing, if it's an (inner) join, it wouldn't export the nulls. Here is an example of an inner join that if used doing an export wouldn't export the NULL vendor_id payment rows: select * -- for brevity from payment p join vendor v on p.vendor_id = v.vendor_id To get the payment rows with null vendor_id, the export would have to be done using an outer (left) join like so: select * -- for brevity from payment p LEFT join vendor v on p.vendor_id = v.vendor_id We don't know how it's exported, so if the author only has access to the exports and not the actual schema, he wouldn't know either. In his example he even has it as nullable: CREATE TABLE payment ( payment_id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, vendor_id INT REFERENCES vendor(vendor_id), payment_date DATE NOT NULL ); Notice the payment_date is defined as explicitly NOT NULL while the vendor_id (the FK he is talking about) is not defined as NOT NULL (implicitly NULL). If the vendor_id is NULL, that would represent a payment with no vendor. Now regarding Musk's tweet: In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. To make an existing NULL field required (NOT NULL) in a RDBMS database, you have to first populate it with something. When it's a FK like vendor_id, you have to populate it with a vendor_id that exists the vendor table. With the amount of rows I would imagine is in that database, this is no easy feat. To make it required, the would have to: 1. Update each NULL row to the actual vendor it was supposed to be (probably impossible to figure this out) 2. Update each NULL row to a new vendor_id named "Unknown" or something to that effect. 3. Update the application(s) that write to the database to make it required, leaving it NULL in the database. 4. Maybe something else One more thing, all this assumes the system is using an RDBMS. If it's a mainframe or something (which it very well might be), all bets are off.
- twodave 2y agoDoes anyone really believe Elon Musk doesn’t understand basic RDBMS theory? Seems like troll-bait to me.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- scarface_74 2y agoI see no indication in his education background any understanding of computer science
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- scarface_74 2y agoThat’s true. But what evidence do you have that he did?
- jp0d 2y agoThat's like saying Physics was mostly invented by people who didn't have an education background in physics. But smart people like Newton and Leibniz figured this out. Sure, with knowledge being so readily available anyone smart and motivated enough can figure out almost anything. But it doesn't make formal education redundant.
- polishdude20 2y agoOh 100%. You should listen to a call he had with twitter engineers where he talks about software as if he's never written it before. Then when someone merely asks questions, Elon calls him an asshole.
- flowerthoughts 2y agoI'd be curious to read the true account of how his personality has changed in the last 25 years. He clearly has more wealth than his persona suggests he deserves, and I wonder from where he started. At this point, he clearly doesn't have to care, but was there a shift into that?
- mhh__ 2y agoMost of these types of articles I'd imagine will be right but there is some truth in the argument that "Ah, you see, the system is merely so complicated and murky that you can't understand it!" is damning too
- ceejayoz 2y agoEvery mildly complex system I’ve worked with / inherited has taken time to understand, and years to find most of the big lurking footguns. That is likely to also be true for taking over the entire Federal government.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tyronehed 2y agoWhen a foreign key field is left empty, that implies that no foreign key relationship was claimed. By definition a primary key cannot be no. But a foreign key, which is a representation of another table's primary key, can be null. It merely means that no foreign key relationship is claimed.