This is pretty much my experience with stored proc codebases too. I do consider SQL to be a very simple language, but store proc codebases tend to become incred

This is pretty much my experience with stored proc codebases too. I do consider SQL to be a very simple language, but store proc codebases tend to become incredibly complex. Finding an engineer that can maintain SQL code is very easy. Finding one that can maintain a particular maze of 1000+ stored procedures, views, functions, table triggers... is a completely different question.