I wrote a small tutorial (~9000 words in two parts) on how to design complicated queries so that they don't need DISTINCT and are basically correct by construction.
This was not my experience, reflecting on about 10 years of service in AWS network engineering (both as an engineer and manager). I’m at Oracle now, which, by contrast, is orders of magnitude more focused on revenue/spend.
I left Amazon in 2012, so things may have changed since then. But in my days I was quite impressed that the goals executives were bonused on did not have the word revenue or profit. The goals were about adoption and customer satisfaction.
“What [schools are] bad at is teaching people to win in adversarial environments. And they're also bad at the meta-game of reminding someone that knowing the basic mechanics of some process does not make them an expert, but does make them a mark. Said differently: if you know which hands win in poker, thinking that this means you know how to play the game makes you a mark, not an expert.”
“And it's hard for a teacher to end a class by telling students that they got an A+ in financial literacy and are now equipped to get ripped off in entirely new ways by an entirely different set of adversaries. But it's also impossible to create a repeatable standardized test that accurately simulates such an adversarial environment, because any time everyone gets the same correct answer, that answer would need to become wrong.”
> During an interview, Osgood Perkins recalled a story from production where he learned Nicolas Cage has a particular skill that he says no other actor possesses: the ability to recognize how high or low he is able to speak without messing up the audio. According to Perkins: "The sound guy came over to me one day...(he) comes up to me a couple of days into Nic being on set and he's like 'Oz, I've never seen anything like it. When Nic is mic'd, I'm watching the dials, when Nic goes big, he goes right to the line. Anything more, a decibel or two over that, and it would be hard to use. Then he goes down, he goes soft and his whispering and he's barely talking, he goes right to the line. Anything past that line, you wouldn't be able to use it. He knows where the lines are. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life'."
Maybe Cage can contribute to the sound design problem actually.
I believe it's a joke. However ... if you store a CV as a blob then separately store skills, experiences in a different table --- does that make the db design imperfect?
Yeah, I was thinking about the way how to actually build a non-1NF database.
So far my best idea is to store sqlite files as blobs in a different database.
Even that is 1NF, probably. As long as you don't have the id,blob duplicated in a table.
1NF (depending on the definition) has a few subtleties that make it either impossible to avoid in any relational database or almost impossible to enforce!
By impossible to avoid, I mean the basic rectangular shape of a table.
By impossible to enforce, I mean the avoidance of duplicates (without indexes) and NULLs.
