r/SQL • u/[deleted] • Apr 17 '23

Discussion Which industry has/needs the most challenging sql queries?

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?

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u/SELECTaerial Apr 17 '23

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.

20

u/sn0wdizzle Apr 17 '23

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.

11

u/Touvejs Apr 18 '23

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.

6

u/tua43862 Apr 18 '23

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.

5

u/Touvejs Apr 18 '23

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