Real-time Memes

You spent days optimizing that SQL query to absolute perfection. Indexes tweaked. JOINs restructured. Subqueries eliminated. You turned a 30-second nightmare into a 0.3-second dream. Your boss was impressed... for approximately 5 minutes. Now they're casually dropping phrases like "real-time dashboards" and "instant analytics" in meetings as if your database isn't already sweating bullets just handling the current load. They have no idea that "real-time" means your beautiful query needs to run every 2 seconds instead of once an hour. Congratulations, you've optimized yourself into a corner. Your reward for fixing the performance issue? A completely unreasonable new requirement that makes the original problem look trivial. The database gods are laughing at you right now.