In the second half of the '90s, Sybperl (Sybase::DBlib, IIRC) allowed me to grow from "have never connected to a database", to "senior dba in charge of 400+ databases running on 40+ servers" in less than 2 years time. Too bad I haven't had the chance to use Sybase in the past decade. DB2, MySQL and Oracle aren't much fun after Sybase. A previous gig gave me the opportunity to connect to MS-SQL using DBD::Sybase, but that was just for a handful of Nagios scripts that needed to be developed.
Thank you, Michael. Not just for your Sybperl, but also for your contributions in various forums (comp.database.* for instance). I hope you'll be posting a similar meditation 20 years from now.