One company I was at did a merger with another startup, and most of the other company's engineers quit. Amongst the piles of Visual Basic we found a stored procedure that was about 5 pages long. It took about 18 hours to run; its job was to do a daily report.
I hate being afraid of code. I spent a day with it, got to understand it, then rewrote it as a couple of queries and some Java code, whereupon it took about five minutes to run.
[... then there was the guy who implemented bitwise AND and OR by precomputing some 65536 entry tables. Wow. Why do I find all the really howling bad stuff so close to databases?]
I hate being afraid of code. I spent a day with it, got to understand it, then rewrote it as a couple of queries and some Java code, whereupon it took about five minutes to run.
[... then there was the guy who implemented bitwise AND and OR by precomputing some 65536 entry tables. Wow. Why do I find all the really howling bad stuff so close to databases?]