Bound in Smoke is going really really well. I'm in the last pass of editing before the MS goes to my editor. For me, this also means writing the last chapter. Word count is currently 76K. Typically, a complete novel (for me) comes in at about 90K. I'm at Chapter 18 so about half way. I should pick up the remaining word count by the time I'm done.

In non book events, some years back I rewrote a datawarehouse to get it out of SQL 2000. Once this project was public and got the support of my boss, I was told not to change any schema, ETLs, or queries which I did not except where existing SQL was not ANSI compliant or did not work in SQL 2008. Load time went from 3 hours to about 20 minutes. (In part because I was also able to cut out a convoluted system of moving data between servers that made no sense at all.) Then we moved to SQL 2019 and we needed additional updates, which I also did. Fast forward to now and I have convinced my boss that we need to look at updating how we load and how the actual SQL works. My preliminary redesign loads in about 15 minutes, and I think I can get it down to less than that. But now that I'm allowed to look at what we're actually doing, I have found errors in the SQL that do not fully load or update the data. Admittedly, I started with the portion that I knew was convoluted, but yikes!

Anyway, I really enjoy this kind of SQL work.