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.
I didn’t read it like that. What I take from it is that he’s implying that the government uses something much stupider than sql, like Lotus1-2-3 or plain txt files or excel. I really wouldn’t be surprised that there’s some government department that had their IT done during the first Bush administration and didn’t really upgrade from it since.
There are also probably some departments that don’t get much funding, so they organise part of their work into some shared excel files.l
Nothing really wrong with that. Unless he’s implying that the entire federal government works like that, which is preposterously stupid.
Seems to me that the most generous interpretation would be the preponderance of Oracle’s DBs in the government, and Musk being pedantic since they aren’t literally called “SQL” like MySQL, MSSQL, or PostgreSQL (even though most Oracle DBs still fall into that category).