New project, 22 million record base, CRAP IO, lots of pain.

I could do nothing until I had a bunch of indexes, and those took ~3-4 minutes each. And looking for both OLD/NEW/Field info meant I needed to index twice for each field that I wanted to query. If I to try to do any type of complete list of fields, I'd be here for the next 2 days just indexing.

And the board meeting is 9AM, they need the report, or the project is possibly canceled.

So I started a limited set of indexes to give me a decent baseline of fields, and let it grind.

I knew I couldn't do anything until done, and went to sleep, setting my alarm for 4AM (estimated ETA, but impossible to predict).

I popped out of bed at 2:41, made coffee, and logged in at 2:45. The indexing had completed at 2:41. Exactly. The moment I woke up. On the dot. Last timestamp on file.

It was calling me.

Don't think so.

I just got berated for about a minute since the only obvious thing that I produced was a report close to a week ago.

And then the outstanding list of things, the incredible important stuff, the stuff needed for the meeting, the stuff that was fully impossible to generate a week ago, well, that, I then generated on demand with a couple of SQL queries.
While they waited. For them to walk into the meeting with.

I really hate being berated for pulling off the miraculous, when it starts out as just plain impossible, at least for the equipment and baseline tools available.