I was the guy that hated databases. This changed after I met my first big dataset, setting-up an alarm management system: Every minute there was a flood of alarms coming to the database. Some were new, some updates of previous alarms. At the end of the day the system received more than 1 million events. And it wasn't at full capacity yet. The system had a reporting/BI application that was slow as hell. Sometimes it needed more that one hour to give the user an answer. My users hated it. I hated it, too.

I tried all the tricks I knew to make that application more responsive and it worked better for a while. Then I learnt new tricks, and it worked for some time until it failed again... over and over again.

That's how I got hooked on data problems.