Same experience just end of last week and beginning of this week: I wasted at least 4 to 4.5 days on a PL/SQL script (a rather simple one, about I would say 300 lines of code) that just stubbornly refused to do what I wanted (I could have made the script in 3 to 4 hours, perhaps even less, in Perl using DBI, but the client did not want that, they insisted on me using PL/SQL, a language that I have used not very much, and it was at least 5 years ago the last time I used it). I stumbled for days on a really stupid problem, namely that if an exception is raised by Oracle (say "no data found"), then the rest of the code of the procedure if not executed, even if you do what is needed to manage the exception. I did not know that, or had forgotten, and did not have a coworker who could help me, we are not using PL/SQL regularly. And it took me ages of debugging time, printing out variables values every other instruction, before I understood what was going wrong. Yes, I was really getting frustrated and angry at not being to solve the problem, but the upside is that I was so happy yesterday when I finally found the solution that I now almost feel good about the whole anecdote. Sorry it that sounds slightly off-topic, my example is not Perl, but I think that you sometimes have these problems and it is good to share about them.