• 6 Posts
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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 22nd, 2024

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  • 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.









  • That, I think, is a symptom not a cause.

    The cause is societal: the EU thinks that innovation should come top down. By giving established corporations subsidies, and a large administration that steers everyone every step of the way. To make sure nobody does anything out of the ordinary.

    That works if you want to improve car crash safety by 5%. But, ofcourse, that doesn’t work for true, novel ideas. Concensus being antagonistic to novelty.

    And it’s not solely a “bad politicians” problem. A majority of Europeans are simply afraid of change, want their 9-to-5 job to look exactly the same for their whole life. The elected reflect their electorate.

    Too bad the world changes regardless of you participating.