Cotton is still king in Georgia. In 2005, the federal government pumped $317 million in subsidies into the state for cotton alone, making it Georgia's top subsidized crop.

Georgia's take was a piece of $23 billion in subsidies paid nationwide that year. American farm subsidies are criticized around the world for artificially depressing crop prices, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution decided to see how those payments help or harm farmers in the United States.

To tell the story, we chose cotton subsidies because of the amount of money involved and the crop's historical importance in Georgia. My collaborators were reporters Ken Foskett and Dan Chapman, and projects editor Jim Walls.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency is responsible for distributing subsidy money. I requested payment data for the entire country dating back to 1994. FSA initially assured me the data included all subsidy payments. But after some research and checking with a fellow CAR person, I discovered I needed databases for three more programs with nearly $4 billion a year in subsidies: tobacco transition payments, commodity certificate payments and cotton cooperative certificate payments.

By requesting a fee waiver because the information was of "public interest," I avoided paying for any of the data. The payment database took about a month to receive, but the others, which are not requested as often, took a little longer. I would recommend requesting expedited action in your FOIA request. Most federal agencies do not recognize such a request, but FSA did.

Once I received 70 GB of data – 180 million records – it was clear that my usual software, Microsoft Access and FoxPro, were not going to cut it.

With trouble-shooting help from our then-CAR editor David Milliron and the book "Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SQL Server 2000 in 21 Days" by Richard Waymire and Rick Sawtell, I took a crash course in SQL Server.

The capabilities of SQL Server were overwhelming at first. It can handle 1 million terabytes of data, versus 2 gigabytes in Access. (The drawback to SQL Server's power is that it comes with a hefty price tag.)

I learned the organization and the differences in SQL statements on deadline. SQL Server syntax slightly differs from SQL commands in FoxPro (wildcards, for example and excluding the semi-colon after each line in a query). One handy feature with SQL Server is the color-coded command text. SELECT, DELETE, INSERT all turn blue when used properly and values turn red when your syntax is correct.

If you're transitioning from Access or FoxPro, stick with what you know (e.g. familiar queries) in the beginning. Once you get used to the software, it's easier to transition to advanced features. I continue to use Access and FoxPro for quick-hit analyses or daily CAR, but SQL Server has offered more advanced options for more organized, efficient analysis.

SQL Server also provides more advanced security and a great feature called transaction logs, which documents almost every change made to the database. Like most database management software, SQL Server provides advanced processing tools.

For the subsidy story, I used summarizing queries to produce aggregates by several different categories. My biggest interest was finding oddities and outliers. (When you see a person with a Beverly Hills address collecting cotton subsidies in Georgia, it piques your interest.) Through geographic and time-ordered slices of the data, I was able to spot trends. Besides calculating the typical