Most Boring Job (Score 1)

I once worked for a University group doing medical research. We had literally 10s of millions of records of patient treatments and 100s of millions of records of perscription data to analyze. A researcher would come to us with a question, such as "What drugs are being used to treat AIDS patients, what is the length of treatment, and what is the average cost of treatment for each drug used?"

We would extract out a subset of the data - say 1000 records or so - and design a query that should give the data needed. We would then run it against the subset records and verify that it worked. Once we were satisfied, we would run it against the main database. Then, for the next two days, we would read, go get coffee/sodas, talk, or take classes.

Eventually, the answers would come back. Then, we had to bring the numbers into something that could produce the pretty graphs and charts that the researchers wanted to insert into their research papers.

Often, the end result would be the researcher looking at the charts and saying, "Oh... I meant to have you restrict the query to drugs in this class rather than all drugs!"

Sigh... Back to the drawing board.