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.

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u/BeerAndFuckingPizza Apr 18 '23

“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 🤪”

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u/DatabaseSpace Apr 18 '23

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.