Most likely not exciting for you blokes at all, but here is my FUCK YEA!!!!
Years ago the Dept of Education created the "90/10 rule"
"The 90/10 rule requires for-profit colleges to get no more than 90% of their revenues from Title IV federal student aid."
For years now at work, we have been asking the bean counters to let us run the numbers for this, but they wouldn't, it was to important for "IT" to get a hold of, and to screw up. There was also some moaning that SQL databases couldn't handle the # of equations involved in this and only Excel could accurately handle it. (Actual quote from the head Accountant, OMG I laughed so hard, in his face when he said it to me.
So the Accounting department created this huge series of spreadsheets that pull data from our Financial Aid database (SQL), then they perform this huge series of really poorly written calculations against it, and let it chug along.
A 3.2ghz quad core, 12gb Ramm system, with nothing on it but Office, takes about 36 hours for Excel to finish running and spit out the final answer. God help you, if you try to even move the mouse in that period of time as the whole thing could screw up.
Figure this thing is parsing a grand total of 556732 payments and invoices, sorting them down into one record for every student for 40869 total records (Yes, these are actual number of records). Then it Codes each item to what type it is, and then tallies it all.
From there it starts breaking things apart by Pell, Sub, Unsub, Credit Card, GAE, DANTES, Cash, Scholarship, etc...
Super complex to say the least.
About 3 weeks ago, I finally had enough of all the bitching about this report, and how hard it is. So I swiped a copy of all of it, and I started recreating it all in SQL.
I finished it Wednesday, and presented it to the Presidents Council yesterday morning. While there, we all caught a change from the DoE that was missed and that I didn't know about. They asked me to correct the report and come back next week when the re-run was complete. I changed it on the spot, reran all the numbers, and had a new answer for them within 5 minutes.
The accountants didnt' believe me that it could be run that fast, so I ran it again with them watching. And then again, and again, etc.... It only takes about 27 seconds (Depending on server load) for SQL to do what it took Excel 36+ hours.
They were not happy with me to say the least.
But my boss, and the CIO grabbed me for lunch and want to send me to DBA classes so I can be a proper SQL admin.