this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Why would Santa need two separate tables for this?
don't underestimate database design in production environments
Exactly, Santa's always watching and audit logs get complicated
I would make two separate views.
The income is a nice touch.
The poor kids can’t even afford coal and fall through the cracks.
Only the nice ones, the naughty poor children get free coal
But not the poor nice ones
The poor nice ones get beaten by the naughty rich ones.
... and by the "nice" rich ones.
Why are we using magic strings for behavior?
Feel free to fork my comment.
Does Santa accept PRs?
It's an ENUM and other people have to read this fucking codebase too, Brian!
I've a DBA who would insist on this being in a dimension table and using a foreign key constraint instead of just a fucking string
I like your DBA!
Users probably don't.
He used to have an is_nice bool but consultants convinced Santa it isn't future proof enough to capture the nuances of kids behaviour in today's world, such as "nice but always is really smug about it". But the consultants kept making PowerPoints instead of updating the backend, so now Santa also has added a new value to behaviour: "consultant-like"
You forgot the join smh
Omitted for brevity.
stop static “variables”! use COL. congress should do the same for setting minimum wage. eg parent.income > COL
which default currency shall santa use ? Dollar have no sense, if presents are free. However Yuan may ease things with providers.
He's in the north pole, so probably Canadian dollars, Russian rubles, or Danish krone (Greenland)
Legacy system. Someone once started curating two spreadsheets for each year because they didn't know better. They had different formats too, because the naughty one listed separate entries for each naughty deed and a column describing it. Whenever they added something to that list, they manually checked and deleted the kid from the nice list.
Eventually, the amount of children they're responsible for got too large, so they learned some basic SQL and built themselves a database. To import the legacy lists and keep their workflow, they built separate tables. Just be glad they eventually learned how to filter by year and stopped creating new schemas for every year.
Relational database. He's got
children, which joins tonaughtyandniceonchildidand both record their status each year so that he can monitor trends.Once you get a few thousand columns wide you create a naughty_list2 for the new data