Oh yeah, the details are the problem. Worse, its a technical problem and a people issue for some kinds of output. Report Writing has all of the problems of graphic design and date munging with none of the rewards. Lord help you if the friggin DBA & Application Developers built the database or other data sources for transactional processing and didn't provide any help (e.g. summary tables, other data source) for batch (set) processing.
I now follow a simple law when setting up a data source: If I need attribute X from an item then I better have a way to find all items with attribute X in a hurry.
I now follow a simple law when setting up a data source: If I need attribute X from an item then I better have a way to find all items with attribute X in a hurry.