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Little Timmy Tables (programming.dev)
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[-] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 17 points 3 hours ago

Separate scanned PDF per person, as an image, no OCR, 3MB in size

[-] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 points 9 minutes ago

You mean the Normal File Format?

[-] taiyang@lemmy.world 26 points 4 hours ago

It's a lot of individual tables because Santa's excel struggles with anything past a few hundred thousand rows. It's not just names, but addresses, lists of desires, and so on.

There are around 2 billion children. If you wonder why he skips so many children, it's not religion or poverty, it's because Santa's files got corrupted.

[-] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 8 points 2 hours ago

In an unfortunate coincidence, the tables were sorted by the children's parents' annual income, so it was the poor kids whose data was lost. That's why rich kids get more presents.

[-] handsoffmydata@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 hours ago

Good guy Tim tryin to make sure everyone has a Merry Christmas. Sounds like nice list material to me.

[-] NullPointerException@lemmy.ca 57 points 6 hours ago

Why would Santa need two separate tables for this?

[-] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 4 points 2 hours ago

Relational database. He's got children, which joins tonaughty and nice on childid and both record their status each year so that he can monitor trends.

[-] spiffpitt@lemmy.world 75 points 6 hours ago

don't underestimate database design in production environments

[-] phorq@lemmy.ml 19 points 6 hours ago

Exactly, Santa's always watching and audit logs get complicated

[-] joyjoy@lemmy.zip 47 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I would make two separate views. 

CREATE VIEW NiceList AS
 SELECT * FROM Children
  WHERE behavior = 'nice' 
   AND parent.income > 40000; 
CREATE VIEW NaughtyList AS
 SELECT * FROM Children
  WHERE behavior = 'naughty'; 
[-] NullPointerException@lemmy.ca 31 points 6 hours ago

The income is a nice touch.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 hours ago

Why are we using magic strings for behavior?

[-] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 6 points 3 hours ago

It's an ENUM and other people have to read this fucking codebase too, Brian!

[-] joyjoy@lemmy.zip 6 points 3 hours ago

Feel free to fork my comment. 

[-] criss_cross@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago

The poor kids can’t even afford coal and fall through the cracks.

[-] ryannathans@aussie.zone 3 points 5 hours ago
[-] joyjoy@lemmy.zip 1 points 3 hours ago

Omitted for brevity. 

[-] Willy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago

stop static “variables”! use COL. congress should do the same for setting minimum wage. eg parent.income > COL

[-] chocrates@piefed.world 2 points 4 hours ago

Once you get a few thousand columns wide you create a naughty_list2 for the new data

[-] towerful@programming.dev 28 points 5 hours ago

Professionals do seem to use excel.
Holy fuck is it painful for anyone that knows what they are doing.

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 25 points 4 hours ago

15000 rows. 120 columns. One sheet. Creation date: 2011. A dedicated computer. Working at a multinational company is bad for mental health.

[-] towerful@programming.dev 7 points 4 hours ago

And then OneDrive comes along, someone accidentally saved "to the cloud" (IE the default windows location of OneDrive). And of course someone (you) has to fix all the desync bullshit.
Fuck excel, fuck Microsoft, fuck OneDrive!

Thank god my company is transitioning to a decent no code solution (nocobase plus literally anything that can interact with postgres - currently n8n but not yet limited to that. It's a transition from excel, literally anything is better! (Tho, nocobase is awesome, non has it's perks)).
Many parentheses, soz.
Fuck excel, use a database!

[-] affenlehrer@feddit.org 5 points 4 hours ago

I've seen that. Used for customer service history AND planning with 3-digit week numbers (the first digit is the last digit of the year) and a lot of macros. Guess who had to fix the macros in 2020 without changing the idiotic 3-digit week numbers?

[-] hypnotoad__@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 hours ago

FiServ. Distributed to clients.

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 8 points 4 hours ago

I've seen at a very large company a workflow that involved manually updating an excel workbook and (I think) saving it on confluence, so a python script could download it and parse it later. It wasn't even doing formulas. It was just like less than a hundred lines of text in a half dozen sheets.

[-] vrek@programming.dev 7 points 4 hours ago

Last year during the Christmas shutdown at work I actually made a crud application to track naughty vs nice children for santa, yes it was sql based(entity framework) with >90%test coverage (tests based off a in memory database) and with a winforms ui(what I had to use at work).

I might revisit and refactor it this year come to think of it.

[-] Penguincoder@beehaw.org 7 points 5 hours ago
[-] nullPointer@programming.dev 6 points 5 hours ago
[-] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 29 points 5 hours ago

Listen, there's room in SQL for more than one input sanitization joke.

this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
604 points (99.2% liked)

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