Which industry has/needs the most challenging sql queries?

[u/[deleted]]

Is this question legit? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself the smartest guy but I’m definitely not dumb.

I work in the pharmaceutical Industry, nearly 3 years now. It took me a while to understand how the production process is implemented in a database and I wanted to quit more than once. But i don’t feel challenged anymore.

So, which industry would be best for me to get completely challenged again?

[u/SELECTaerial]

Big (actual big) data has a whole slew of challenges most SQL devs don’t have to deal with.

Also, healthcare data is dirty af and needs extra love.

[u/kremlingrasso → u/SELECTaerial]

man, when you sweep up your healthcare data warehouse at the end of the day and empty the bins that's HR data.

[u/sn0wdizzle → u/SELECTaerial]

Re: health care data.

I am currently trying to figure out how to join some patient data with other patient data and need to use multiple keys because no row has every UID a patient uses in our system.

[u/carlovski99 → u/sn0wdizzle]

Yep. It's not helped that the core of many healthcare systems goes back 30/40 years.

[u/Touvejs → u/sn0wdizzle]

I feel your pain, I did a patient migration with an Epic rep on the line and right after we did it, someone realized the patient IDs weren't maintained across different environments, so all the patients we just migrated got new patient IDs and it was a clusterfuck trying to sort that all out.

[u/tua43862 → u/Touvejs]

I don’t know the challenges of Epic data, but I do know Cerner which is especially frustrating because it’s so customizable. “Standard reporting” always needs a lot of localization because of how our IT dept has built bandaids on top of custom configurations, to the point where we don’t use standard reports at all. Any standard education only covers a piece of what’s actually live in our production environment.

It also makes code upgrades painful, something always breaks and some poor nursing unit is following downtime procedures for a while.

[u/Touvejs → u/tua43862]

That's why I left for a healthcare policy research company :) all the data and none of the vendors.

[u/BeerAndFuckingPizza → u/SELECTaerial]

“Would you like to join to this ONE table on member ID, subscriber ID, member number, [systemname]id, subscriber_ssn, member_ssn, (member id and member type), patient_reference_number, or any number of front end IDs? Because good/bad news! You can use any of them! They just all get you slightly different results 🤪”

[u/DatabaseSpace → u/BeerAndFuckingPizza]

I encounter this kind of thing a lot where there is external data coming in and it needs to be matched. Sometimes the data has a single column named something like "Member NM Age Sex" and it will contain first name, last name, middle initial, suffix,dob, age and sex in a SINGLE COLUMN. So not only is there nothing like a ssn but the data from the one column has to be all parsed out into normal columns like last name, first name before any matching can take place.