No, uh-uh. You can't sweep a data loss bug under the rug, under any circumstances, especially in a filesystem. Curdle someone's data just once and they'll never trust you again.

AWK.

The hour I spent learning AWK way back when must have saved me a few days, cumulatively, on mundane data munging tasks over the years.

My Ph.D. advisor gave me his copy when I was just getting started with my thesis, almost twenty years ago. I remember spending 6-7 very intense weeks with it. It gave me most of the mathematical/logical background specific to databases I needed to finish what was primarily a DB focused dissertation. I kept coming back to it all through my studies and later.

If you ever need to design a logically sound query processor/optimizer and/or data storage layer, this is a book you should study.

It still sits on my bookshelf, waiting for the student whose interest in databases is deeper than dujourDB, so that I can pass it down to them.

What are you working on now? If in industry, do you actively use what you learned in your PHD? Was it worth it?

Mostly bioinformatics these days. I’m in academia, and have been virtually all my career, so I can’t really speak to whether a Ph.D. is worth it in industry.