60k rows of anything will be pulled into the file cache and do very little work on the drive. Possibly none after the first read.
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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I'm a data engineer that processes 2 billion row 3000 column datasets every day, and I open shit in Excel with more than 60k rows. What the hell is this chick talking about?
Seems like a good excuse to someone who doesn't know what they're doing and needs an excuse because why they haven't completed it yet?
The whole post is complete bs in multiple ways. So weird.
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Some interesting facts about excel I learned the hard way.
- It only supports about a million or so rows
- It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.
Not really related to what you said, but I'm still sore about the bad data import that caused me days of work to clean up.
It completely screws up numbers if the column is a number and the number is over 15 digits long.
I work in insurance in Brazil, by standards of our regulatory body, claims numbers must be a string of 20 numbers (zfill(20) if needed). You can't imagine the amount of times excel had fucked me up rounding down the claim numbers, this is one of the first things I teach to my interns and juniors when they're working with the claims databases.
The row limitation seems, to me, like an actually-good thing. Excel is for data where you might conceivably scroll up and down looking at it and 1M is definitely beyond the ability of a human even to just skim looking for something different.
An older version of Excel could only handle 64k rows and I had a client who wanted large amounts of data in Excel format. "Oh sorry, it's a Microsoft limitation," I was thrilled to say. "I have no choice but to give you a useful summarization of the data instead of 800k rows (each 1000 columns wide) of raw data."
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When the only thing that is stopping kids from dismantling your government is an O(N^N) algorithm
Are you telling me there’s a difference between an inner and a cross join?
Cross join is obviously faster, I don’t even have to write “on”
I didn't know hard drive overheating was a thing. Should I be worried that my 5 year old hard drive is about to overheat. I mean is this actually a floppy disk or something?
it is a thing, but any competently designed computer should have things in place to prevent this.
unless you're an arrogant dipshit and disable all the hardware safeties on your computer to make it go faster and wear harder.
When an HDD works continuously it can heat up to above 60 °C if proper air circulation is not allowed, which can cause a very premature failure. In fact, it should be kept under 40 °C to achieve the intended lifespan. Unfortunately, PC cases are usually not great at removing heat from the HDD by default.
As for your drive, it most likely has a temperature sensor so it can be displayed by various utilities.
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it is, in the select event that your platter bearing fails, in which case it would be very, very obvious.
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my hard drive overheated
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?
I'd much sooner assume that they're just fucking stupid and talking out of their ass tbh.
Same as Elon when he confidently told off engineers during his takeover of Twitter or gestures broadly at the Mr. Dunning Kruger himself
Wonder if it’s an SQL DB
Elon probably hired confident right wingers whose parents bought and paid their way through prestigious schools. If he hired anyone truly skilled and knowledgeable, they’d call him out on his bullshit. So the people gutting government programs and passing around private data like candy are just confidently incorrect
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 run queries throughout the day that can return 8 million+ rows easily. Granted, it takes few minutes to run, but it has never caused a single issue with overheating even on slim pc’s.
This makes no fucking sense. 60k rows would return in a flash even on shitty hardware. And if it taxes anything, it’s gonna be the ram or cpu- not the hard drive.
In my experience, the only time that I've taxed a drive when doing a database query is either when dumping it, or with SQLite's vacuum, which copies the whole thing.
For a pretty simple search like OP seems to be doing, the indices should have taken care of basically all the heavy lifting.
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Even if it was local, a raspberry pi can handle a query that size.
Edit - honestly, it reeks of a knowledge level that calls the entire PC a "hard drive".
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My one question would be "How?"
What the hell are you doing that your hard drives are overheating? How do you even know it's overheating as I'm like 90% certain hard drives (except NVMe if we're being liberal with the meaning of hard drive) don't even have temperature sensors?
The only conclusion I can come to is that everything he's saying is just bullshit.
They have temp sensors. But have never heard of a overheating drive.
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From the same group that doesn't understand joins and thinks nobody uses SQL this is hardly surprising .
Probably got an LLM running locally and asking it to get data which is then running 10 level deep sub queries to achieve what 2 inner joins would in a fraction of the time.
You're giving this person a lot of credit. It's probably all in the same table and this idiot is probably doing something like a for-loop over an integer range (the length of the table) where it pulls the entire table down every iteration of the loop, dumps it to a local file, and then uses plain text search or some really bad regex's to find the data they're looking for.
Considering that is nearly exactly some of the answers I've received during the technical part of interviews for jr data eng, you're probably not far off.
Shit I've seen solutions done up that look like that, fighting the optimiser every step (amongst other things)
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Hard drive was made by Tesla
As a reasonably experienced "data guy," this seems obviously laughable, but the discussion on X is scary. This guy is a savior in the MAGA world.
We can criticize and poke fun all day, but it doesn't matter much if our message isn't challenging the mindset of those with other opinions.
How do we make better use of our time to impact outside opinion?
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60k isn't that much, I frequently run scripts against multiple hundreds of thousands at work. Wtf is he doing? Did he duplicate the government database onto his 2015 MacBook Air?
60k is laughably, embarrassingly small. It's still sqlite-sized.
i mean its even excel sized depending on how many columns. This is seriously sad and alarming
Hey now that's real close to the 65,535 16-bit limit (from 20 years ago)
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A TI-86 can query 60k rows without breaking a sweat.
If his hard drive overheated from that, he is doing something very wrong, very unhygienic, or both.
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Wow.
I've been processing a couple of billion rows of data on my machine, the fans didn't even come on. WTF are they teaching "experts" these days, or has Elmo only hired people who claim that they can "wrangle data" and say "yes" ?
Even if querying data was processing-heavy and even if somehow the ‘hard drive’ got warm during this, then there still would need to be a hardware defect in order for the drive to overheat.
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Is this a real post? I can’t seemed to find it on that website “X, formerly known as Twitter.”
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This shit sounds like when your mom tells you that the Facebook printed out her bank statement on the fax machine. I'm not smart enough to even guess how you did something dumb enough to make that happen.
How bad are you at writing queries? How does your hard drive overheat even under 100% load? Do you have it smothered under a blanket? Did you crack it up and expose it to cheeto dust? What does running a query on your, presumably, remote database even have to do with your harddrive in the first place? Are you trying to copy the entire database locally to a laptop? Do you know how to tie your shoes yet, or are you still on the velcro?
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What in the fuck is this idiot doing? I've process datasets far larger than that and never once have I run into a hard drive "overheat". I mean what level of incompetence do you have to have to get a hard drive to overheat processing a measley 60K rows of data?
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