In a product that effectively boils down to CRUD in many places, the most time consuming thing for me so far has been one of two things: * Complex reporting

In a product that effectively boils down to CRUD in many places, the most time consuming thing for me so far has been one of two things: * Complex reporting requirements with an extremely vague specification on a completely normalised database. The sheer quantity of various joins was fun. There must've been a better way * Optimising certain read operations which operated over a potentially large dataset. * Providing an efficient full-text search based around lucene which had some pretty interesting requirements, that came down to lucene filters in the end. Overall, it's mostly been about optimisation. And that is simply measure, measure, measure. Doing things blindly gets you no-where.