this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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See the post on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/provisionalidea.bsky.social/post/3lhujtm2qkc2i

According to many comments, the US government DOES use SQL, and Musk is not understanding much what's going on.

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[–] iii@mander.xyz 11 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

In the context of this tweet most important differences are:

SQL is a language for querying databases.

Most common used databases are relational databases. With relational databases you can setup, well, relations and constraints.

Imagine you have 2 tables (2 excel sheets) one with people, and one with home ownership. You can set the following constraint: (1) each person shows up only once in the people table. And the following relation: (2) every home owner must refer to an existing person in people table.

When modifying the table contents, the system checks if no constraints or relations are violated.

Excel, just like a badly designed relational databse, would, for example, have no problem with duplicate people, or home ownership referring to non-existant people.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

I spent more than I'd like to admit wondering "what the fuck is a wel relation?!"

[–] answersplease77@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

I get what you say but excel even the 98 version can do duplicate/missing data constraints.