This describes a fair portion of my daily duties. As the DBA for a rather old project, my first hour of each day is spent checking on the health of the system, and most of the rest of my time is spent gathering and organizing data directly from the databases. A lot of times it makes more sense for me to spend a few days figuring out a set of queries for a report, then running it when my customers need it, rather than having some middle manager dig through his records and killing off a day at a time for him. I'm usually the best person to dig through the data because I'm familiar with it