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by xupybd 2030 days ago
Exactly that. It's a nightmare to maintain but business types seem to demand it.
1 comments

I used to work at big hospital that had a home-grown 'reporting system' built with Excel, data connections to an SQL Server database, and a series of pivot tables. Every morning from 8-9am the whole network would slow as people opened their spreadsheet and it basically did a `select * from a_rather_large_view` - tens of gigabytes flying around (this was in the mid 2000s.)

There was resistance after a data warehouse (BO) was introduced because pivot tables were so flexible and well-understood.