this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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So, this means they either have a local copy on disk of whatever database they're querying, or they're dumping a remote db to disk at some point before/during/after their query, right?
Either way, I have just one question - why?
Edit: found the thread with a more in-depth explanation elsewhere in the thread: https://xcancel.com/DataRepublican/status/1900593377370087648#m
So yeah, she's apparently toting around an external hard drive with a copy of the "multiple terabytes" large US spending database, running queries against it, then dumping the 60k-row result set to CSV for further processing.
I'm still confused at what point the external drive overheats, even if she is doing all this in a "hot humid" hotel room that she can't run any fans I guess because her kids were asleep?
But like, all of that just adds more questions, and doesn't really answer the first one - why?
Have you ever heard of case of overheating hard drives within the last decade?
Plus, 60k is nothing. One of our customers had a database that was over 3M records before it got some maintenance. No issue with overheating lol
I literally work with ~750,000 line exports on the daily on my little Lenovo workbook. It gets a little cranky, especially if I have a few of those big ones open, but I have yet to witness my hard drive melting down over it. I'm not doing anything special, and I have the exact same business-economy tier setup 95% of our business uses. While I'm doing this, that little champion is also driving 4 large monitors because I'm actual scum like that. Still no hardware meltdowns after 3 years, but I'll admit the cat likes how warm it gets.
750k lines is just for the branch specific item preferences table for one of our smaller business streams, too - FORGET what our sales record tables would look like, let alone the whole database! And when we're talking about the entirety of the social security database, which should contain at least one line each in a table somewhere for most of the hundreds of millions of people currently living in the US, PLUS any historical records for dead people??
Your hard drive melting after 60k lines, plus the attitude that 60k lines is a lot for a major database, speaks to GLARING IT incompetence.