I made converts of a bunch of our Oracle people. We had an internal project to do back-end processing; we wanted to take the data files we normally produce for customers and provide them in a fairly wonky format for another group in the company. Being the Unix geek-of-all-trades and de facto text slinger, I was handed the task and thought "You know, I only want to write this once." (We have over thirty data products that we sell, and surely this one product would not be the only one we'd have to convert.) So I wrote a Perl script to read our file format description files and store that data (a hash of arrays of hashes) in a Perl data structure. When we reviewed the code, the Oracle people were impressed. When I told them about the DBI modules, they were ready to jump in feet first. Of course, bloody management said ...

Well anyway, when they get data that does not map cleanly to the Oracle way or database way, they often come to me to help, or at least to try to get a different view of the data. Not only are they learning Perl, but they are learning to see our data from a different perspective; as such, they are writing better database objects.

Now that is cool.