Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Having looked in my Mystery Box of potential topics for blog posts, I’ve found a couple of things which are relatively short and don’t really make sense on their own. The first is an observation about key combinations on the command line, and the second is a joke which came to me recently and I wanted to publish before someone else came up with it independently. By my calculations, the first half of the post will be technical enough to justify writing this, and the second half will be funny enough to justify someone reading this, but not by much.

Setting up a new database, or adding a new user privilege to one, and even creating a new table in one is something that even database administrators do relatively rarely. After all, if the number of databases or tables is changing faster than you’re querying the data it contains, then you’re probably doing something wrong. It is only natural, therefore, that the commands for these “one off” actions are more easily remembered, through practice, than the SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE commands that make up the bulk of a database’s activity. Even if one can remember the precise syntax for the commands, or one uses a graphical interface where syntax errors are impossible, there are still corner cases where the semantics of the database server can be counter-intuitive. Recently I bumped into two such cases.