Heh, I agree with you minus one consulting case: over a span of 10 years, my client had built an unholy disaster of Oracle PL/SQL on top of their not-great sche

Heh, I agree with you minus one consulting case: over a span of 10 years, my client had built an unholy disaster of Oracle PL/SQL on top of their not-great schema. While I wouldn’t call it unstable (queries did always return), query performance would vary dramatically even with the same inputs on an isolated install. I spent more time than I should have trying to track it down, but ultimately gave up. What was my task? Add XML export into a poorly done XML schema, and do it all in PL/SQL; the data that went into the XML was a mixture of normal queries and computed PL/SQL results. That schema + stored procedure monstrosity sticks out in my mind as the most unholy disasters I’ve ever worked on.