This is one of those things that seems like it would have limited value at first, but once you start to play with it you realize how powerful it actually is. T

This is one of those things that seems like it would have limited value at first, but once you start to play with it you realize how powerful it actually is. The first database software that I was paid to work on was UniVerse. At the time it was owned by, I believe, VMark Software, but it changed hands a few times and is now part of the Rocket U2[0] family. It has an equivalent feature, which was very heavily used, called I-Descriptors. An I-Descriptor is an entry in a file's data dictionary that contained code to execute to calculate the value. You could generate a full name out of the firstname/lastname fields, perform conditional logic (e.g., return a specific address based on a preferred address field), etc. You could also call subroutines, where you had the full power of the BASIC language available. One of the interesting things I did was created a field which would perform geolocation based on the postal code portion of the address. It would split out the postal code, check a cache file for the data, call a web service to retrieve the data and cache it (if it wasn't in the cache already, otherwise it would just return the cached value), and return the results. Everything needed was built in to the database, it was just a matter of coding it. The best part was that it became just another thing you could do in the query language - answering the question "list all active clients in this geographic area" became just another query. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_U2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_U2