Memories of waiting for months to get access to a MS SQL database and ending up putting an Access database on a network share for multiple user access instead. A horrible, horrible hack solution. But it worked!

I volunteered at an archaeology lab run by the state govt a few months ago.

Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years.

I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particular action was running slow because it had to touch multiple files by necessity (he’d rolled his own sharding) — but generally speaking, it was a work of art more effective than anything I could’ve ever come up with. Sometimes the “dirty hacks” are the best solutions.