What I learned in library school
Phooey on those librarians who say you never use the stuff they teach you in library school.
I whiled away an hour or two writing some big ugly hairy SQL queries on the repository database, because one of our communities wanted to know what keywords they were using on a per-collection basis. Well, first I have to know how the database references Dublin Core subjects (and because of DC qualifiers, there are several possibilities), and then I have to figure out which items I’m looking at and divide them up by collection, and then go fetch the actual keywords out of the items table… it gets complicated.
What I came up with is probably sub-optimal in sixteen different ways—but by gosh, it works. And I didn’t know a word of SQL until I learned it in library school.