As an extra duty, I had to manage a large, overly-complex web-based application on Windows IIS with Oracle and asp. Naturally (for me at least), I turned to LAMP. Perl (and the other tools) helped me develop my own system without disturbing the ugly application on the Windows server. Tying the two together was a simple as writing Perl scripts that used both DBD:mysql and DBD:Oracle to push and pull data in and out of my applications.

Now that we have a real DBA (I'm really just a scientist), the tables may all migrate to the Oracle server but the Perl scripts will remain with only a few changes. Turning to LAMP can all be written off as my own unwillingness to devote my life to WIOA (Windows, IIS, Oracle, ASP) but using Perl helped me reserve a little time for my real job.

Even after the migration, Perl will always be my choice for manipulation of large amounts of data in and out of databases and large, proprietary scientific applications.