tannenfreund87

I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.

Cuisine in Europe is shaped by climate, soil and former political entities. You'll find similar cuisine in and around the alps, along the north sea coast and around the baltic sea. While the people eating the same food speak a dozen different languages.

Western Poland used to be German, but all the Germans left/got expelled. After WW2 it was resettled with Poles from Eastern Poland, nowadays Ukraine and Belarus. Which makes traveling from Berlin to Poznan or Wroclaw an interesting experience. Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe.

Also, you'd be surprised at how widespread pickled herring is in Bavaria. Herring has been a trading good for millennia in Europe, was and is still consumed in the winter months in Bavaria. You can easily get a "Fischsemmel" at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Bavarians also used to pickle everything for the winter: cucumbers, beets, cabbage, beans.

The whole idea of making train tickets extremly cheap is to make it "competitive" to cars. Trains are already cheaper to use than cars for a lot of people. But many people already own a car and have to pay the fixed costs per month anyway. Insurance, taxes, depreciation

If they plan a trip, the don't calculate the whole cost of ownershipt, they calculate the distance and how much fuel they need (a.k.a. flexible costs).

An extremely cheap ticket makes the car owners stop using their cars so much. This is not just a benefit for the abstact idea of "environment", but also a direct benefit for the population. Less cars means less noise pollution, less air pollution and more space on the roads. That way people, who actually need a car, van or truck to get around and do their work, benefit.

Because I can just write SQL to access all my data. The data comes from CSVs, SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, ...

I can write SQL everywhere. I write SQL from within my R scripts, I write SQL from within my Python scripts. SQL is THE language for querying databases, others came and went, SQL will stay with us for the next decades. Even the dbplyr people say (parapfhrased): If you can't express what you want with the tidyverse, just write your SQL and load the result as a dataframe.

DuckDB is a column-oriented database. This is why it's so fast compared to SQLite for a lot of analytical queries. CSV is a row-based format. DuckDB has to load it completley to memory before it can run any queries. Depending on the amount of RAM and Swap you have avialable, it's better to use parquet or similar column-based formats for data storage. Even SQLite as format is faster than CSV, since SQLite is already optimized, integers and floats take less space in SQLite format than as CSV.

On the contrary, the need for UUIDs is growing. Once you have multiple users collecting and editing data for a central database, you'll run into primary key conflicts. Of course not, if your users are constantly online and never lose the connection to the database. But modern usecases have a remote database over the internet and distributed users, often with slow or spotty connection.

I've developed a field survey app for foresters. They use it on toughbooks, tablets and phones. They are collecting spatial data, so the geometry column in the tables gets quite big. The app on the device uses a SQLite (Spatialite) database, the central database is Postgres (PostGIS). They will often edit the same area, so without UUIDs, there will be duplication of primary keys, thus making the database inconsistent. Then I will be flooded in support tickets and it will cause more slowdown than just using UUID4. And the performance drop of UUID7 is negligible compared to bigint for primary key.