Sure, but I took an unmaintainable stored procedure (with very few comments, by the way) and turned it into something that was small, well-documented, and that

Sure, but I took an unmaintainable stored procedure (with very few comments, by the way) and turned it into something that was small, well-documented, and that ran over two orders of magnitude faster. If this is wrong and goes against "DB best practices" then I guess this answers my question about where the howlers come from. [We had a project under development. At some point, and an utter surprise to the team, an Oracle consultant showed up one day and said, "I'm here to tune your database." "Huh?" And he did. Against a half-built system with a schema we were still designing, he "optimized" our queries and determined buffers sizes and whatnot, and then he went away. Apparently the people in Sales were panicked that we had a database under development that we hadn't yet made plans to tune, so they had hired a guy to come in and fix things. We tossed all of his scripts and rolled back everything he'd broken, and continued coding. Total waste of money. Databases are a weird confluence of the power-mad, the knuckle-draggers, the money-grubbers, and a few techies who know what the heck they're doing.]