UK Covid App Drops 16000 results due to file truncation

2 pointsnickdothutton1 comment

On the day we learned that the UK’s Covid app truncated 16000 results because the input file was too large, it feels like a good time to re-post this from 2017: https://blog.eutopian.io/the-age-of-invisible-disasters/

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It's also important to be precise. No, not the App dropped 16000 results. The automation process that gathered the results into an Excel Workbook used the old XLS Format which has this limit and quietly fails when it is exceeded.

So while we can all joke about using Excel as a database this one's really on Microsoft.

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