“The default name prefix is changed to be ‘sqlite’ spelled backwards” (2006) | Hacker News Reader

“The default name prefix is changed to be ‘sqlite’ spelled backwards” (2006)

github.com

157 pointssidcool28 comments

I'm reminded of the "car owners sending emails to the developer of curl" story. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/

When linking to github you should use the hotkey "y" to get a permalink to the line number on the commit, otherwise it changes as code changes:

https://github.com/endlesssoftware/sqlite3/blob/8004eeafeec9...

Even better, don't link to some random version in GitHub but use the Fossil version on SQLite's site:

https://sqlite.org/src/artifact?ln=43-66&name=48388821692e87...

As the developers of the Phusion Passenger application server we would get emails from Justin Bieber fans when one of their fan sites went down. Same for a couple of other community products that used our server. It was actually quite fun because we'd learn about some group of users who benefited from our open source product that we're normally not aware of. It was also a but difficult because like sqlite it's not easy to explain why our company name is on this error page when we're actually not responsible for the problem.

Previous discussion from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9196218 (108 comments)

Am I the only one that doesn't get it? Why would anybody be annoyed by a temporary file?

Try take a summer vacation working in desktop support :)

I actually worked in desktop support a couple of years ago but I never got anything about temp files, most of the time it was the usual stuff (Internet stopped working, computer won't boot, etc.)

Depends on whether that temporary file gets properly cleaned up or not. A myriad of temporary files with more showing up every day could be a significant disk hog, especially for an enterprise with thousands of affected employees.

OK, that actually makes some sense to me.

People get upset over all sorts of things. Look at this thread [1] where everybody without a clue gets involved to solve the mystery of an NTFS ADS called :WofCompressedData.

[1] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/what-i...

This thread is pretty much every Microsoft forum thread ever.

Did they try rebooting, clearing cache, and reinstalling?

A Google search for "etilqs" reveals a lot of people asking about them, amusingly.

I think people get annoyed when the temp files don't get deleted after the process is complete and the files continue to accumulate forever.

I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why ODBC drivers for an older version of MS Dynamics NAV would randomly cause crashes starting 5am on 12/31/2018. Looking at the queries, we noticed that only queries with ORDER BY clause failed with an error about not having enough swap space. The drive had plenty of storage so we weren't sure. Only when we looked into the Temp folder for SWP*.tmp files did we see an interesting result: 65535 file(s).

Apparently the driver created swap files in the temp folder to sort the results of ORDER BY. But sometimes it failed and left the temp files orphaned. The name of each temp file was SWP[int 1-65535].tmp. It appeared that at 5am it created the max 16-bit int swap file and from that point on, every number it tried already existed, throwing the 'not enough space' error. A simple delete fixed the issue.

The path we took to get to the solution was riddled with panic-fueled nightmares. DB corruption on the last day of the year when Finance was running their year-end reports would have been a terrible way to usher in 2019. We ran all the tools on the DB and its backups but nothing seemed to isolate the cause until we looked at the Temp folder on a whim.

Apologies for the long rant but just wanted to highlight a real-world (and still painfully sore) example of annoyance from temp files.

These etilqs files consumed 60GB of this[1] person's hard drive space.

I think it was a good decision to change the name of these files because they give sqlite a bad name while the problem is not of their doing.

[1] https://community.wd.com/t/etilqs-files-in-temp-folder-consu...

Hundreds of tutorials and books have taught people to save example files into the temp folder going back to the DOS days leading them to believe it’s a directory they own and control rather than one shared by anybody.

Also I suspect badly designed cleanup utilities would complain about SQLite files that cannot be deleted because they’re in use leading to web searches.

No offense, but this is a dumb solution to the problem.

You honestly think that people having this problem can't google "etilqs" and still find sqlite?

https://www.google.com/search?q=etilqs&oq=etilqs

Did you read the comment? It says something like:

> People smart enough to figure out the code are also smart enough to realize that emailing the developer won't help.

I don't know what pulls up on that search result for you (Google searches are individualized), but for me, I mostly get tips on how to resolve it, not the SQLite developers.

I don't know if it works, but it seems like a pretty harmless change.

Is there a valid reason to publish your contact number? Wouldn't not having it accessible been the easier solution? Of course, someone could email too, but it's easier to deal with them; easier even to create a filter and ignore them altogether.

Blaming people for having their contact info somewhere on the internet is not really relevant. There are many valid reasons why people could contact you or why you prefer contact information to be available somewhere, in this case for example to hire an expert SQLite consultant.

Problem is that a determined enough misguided user will also be able to find you in that case.

That’s fine, but I surely would not have my publicly listed phone number connected to something that could ring and wake me at night.

The internet seemed more trusting back in 2006. Also, things like Google Voice didn't exist yet and who knew spam/robocalls would be such an issue.

Hindsight is always 20/20

Maybe 1996? 2006 is hardly the early days. I remember people are being more paranoid about the Internet then, stoked by confusion in the media. The people who manufactured my glass torch thought that if they publish their phone number on the Internet circa 2005, their phone would be ringing off the hook with strangers asking them questions. Also, that’s still was a time when some people still thought shopping online meant their credit card number was more likely to be stolen somehow. Granted that those who thought these things we’re not technologically sophisticated.

These days, many businesses have their phone numbers on the Internet. I had mine on my Instagram profile. Nobody unusual called me. If I was embroiled in perennial controversy, though, or mistaken for someone who was, things likely would’ve been different.

"Also, that’s still was a time when some people still thought shopping online meant their credit card number was more likely to be stolen somehow."

Perhaps they were wiser than we thought given all the data/security breaches in the past few years.

But many of the breaches have involved companies like TJ Maxx or Target. Few realized that shopping at a nationwide brick and mortar store was a way a card might be stolen.

Also, people thought their card would be intercepted during transmission, not taken from a database. That's what journalists were writing about, I guess.

I agree, the database hacking may not have been seen as much as it should have been by the general public. As a programmer I can say for sure that people like me, however, were thinking about it.

Here's a link about recent data breaches that may include credit card information. Several big companies in here.

https://www.businessinsider.com/data-breaches-2018-4

Well, I have a fairly popular npm module (gulp module) that I don't use anymore... on ocassion an issue from a dependency will break things, or have a security issue etc. Many people's builds may be broken, and unfortunately I don't always keep up on email or github notifications. That said, if someone reached out, it's generally going to get a faster fix.

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