I've just had a nightmare of a development problem. In a nut-shell, I've had to import data, (specifically content articles), from one server to another.
This is normally not a problem, but in this instance the source database had each article's content split into multiple 'page' rows. Also, the source database was developed and hosted by another company. They refused to install PHPMyAdmin, (for "security" reasons), and would not give me FTP access. All I had to work with was a terrible database admin system which they'd cobbled together.
My plan was to dump the data into a new database on our server, manipulate it there, then move the shiny clean data over to the live system. Things did not go to plan...
A year or so ago I was given the task of returning rows of data from a MySQL table in a randomised fashion. This in itself is fairly easy but the project which I was working on displays the data in a paginated format so a constantly shifting random data order would not work. The client also requested that the random order should "re-shuffle" every once in a while.