The Data Vault

I am bill? · by Bill Berger

The Data Vault

I am in my forties and I’m standing at the mouth of a temple.

I have been sent to retrieve one piece of information. A customer’s name. This should take a moment, and I will be right back, and everything is going to be fine.

The temple is a Data Vault. You don’t know what that is. Good. A man in my company looked at the schema directly and he is no longer with us. What I can tell you is that the customer’s name is in there, and that “in there” is a direction, not a location, and that I can see infinite tables from the entrance and they go deeper. Each table has a purpose. No one remembers the purpose. The purposes are correct.

I enter.

The first join is fine. The second join is fine. By the seventh join I can feel something watching me and my hands are moving and I’m not moving them. SELECT. FROM. WHERE. INNER JOIN. My fingers know the ritual and my mind has left because my mind cannot be here for this. A subclause appears and it is nested inside another subclause and I do not question it. I am a vessel now. The query is writing itself through me and I can hear chanting from somewhere below the tables and it is getting louder.

‘datavault datavault snickety-sneee. slavery-blatherly-slipeeedo. i’v got ur data indeed i do’ ‘datavault datavault snickety-sneee. slavery-blatherly-slipeeedo. i’v got ur data indeed i do’ ‘datavault datavault snickety-sneee. slavery-blatherly-slipeeedo. i’v got ur data indeed i do’

The man who went insane is in the corner. He is rocking and he is saying the table names and there are so many table names. HUB_CUSTOMER. SAT_CUSTOMER_DETAIL. LINK_CUSTOMER_ACCOUNT. SAT_LINK_CUSTOMER_ACCOUNT_EFFECTIVITY. He will not stop and he cannot stop because there are more. There are always more.

I am on join thirty-four. The chanting is deafening. Something enormous shifts beneath the schema. I have been here for a thousand years. My hands are still moving. I don’t look at what they’re writing anymore because looking is how he went insane.

The query is done. It is two hundred and eleven lines long. It retrieves one name. I hit EXECUTE.

‘DATAVAULT DATAVAULT SNICKETY-SNEEE. SLAVERY-BLATHERLY-SLIPEEEDO. I’V GOT UR DATA INDEED I DO’ ‘DATAVAULT DATAVAULT SNICKETY-SNEEE. SLAVERY-BLATHERLY-SLIPEEEDO. I’V GOT UR DATA INDEED I DO’ ‘DATAVAULT DATAVAULT SNICKETY-SNEEE. SLAVERY-BLATHERLY-SLIPEEEDO. I’V GOT UR DATA INDEED I DO’

It runs in four microseconds because the machine does not care. The machine was never afraid. The machine didn’t have to be here for this.

SYNTAX ERROR AT LINE 34: UNEXPECTED TOKEN NEAR ‘FROM’

A comma. I was missing a comma.

I go back in.