The curious case of 2.2.id steem accounts
Yesterday while I was fetching data for https://steemit.com/steem/@gokulnk/steem-first-100-users I had made some mistakes. @blockchainstudio pointed out the mistake and then I corrected it. Since it was confirmed that @ned's id was 497 I was just checking out the accounts below 500 I came across an anomaly.
Can you spot the difference from the above screenshot? Yes, you got it right. There are some ids which are in the format of 2.2.id like 2.2.443, 2.2.444, 2.2.446, 2.2.448 and 2.2.449. So I collected these names and ran it through my script
When I fetch the id from javascript API I didn't see this anomaly. I also checked https://www.steemd.com/@schuh and https://www.steemd.com/@usd . There were no anomalies. So I wanted to check if there were other accounts like these. So I used the following query
select COUNT(id) from [dbo].[Accounts] where ISNUMERIC(id) = 0; to figure out that there are 50774 account of such nature. So this seems like a common occurrence, where in 2.2 is prepended to the id while saving in database but all the API return only the id part when return the results in API.
Recently when I was working on some analytics from the platform I was having an issue in converting this column to a numeric column. It was not clear to me why it was throwing an issue. Now I know :)
Probably somebody who has worked on the Steem blockchain core can shed more light on this. I might take a dig at it in a later stage. But there are too many pending things that I need to complete now. So I am sparing it for another free time ;)