a month into the IT role at Abisena and most of my day is still queries: pulling records out of a hospital information system for reports nobody wants to write by hand.
the interesting part isn't the SQL itself, it's the constraints around it: real patient data, a system that can't go down, forms built for a workflow that's changed three times since.
I've started keeping a private notes file of query patterns that keep coming back. might turn it into something public once it's less specific to this one system.
update: the query work turned into a rebuild. I rewrote more than 10 queries from scratch, cutting the table joins they never needed, and loading a typical 15,000-row report went from over 30 seconds to 6.5 seconds. the Pascal-based forms and document modules I built are used about 3,500 times a month, on a system with about 3,000 users.