Steven Lembark <lembark (at) wrkhors.com> exclaimed:

• Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 05:19:49 -0600

  The URL is on an internal LAN for a company whose name
  I cannot use. The site gets up to a few hundred hits
  per second supporting a telephone call center database.
  My company was asked to develop a web
  front end onto a TB data warehouse. The existing system
  (carefully crafted in C) was so slow people couldn't
  get their work done (e.g., 45-minute query times). We
  re-did the back end and slapped an interface on it using
  mod_perl.
  
  The first time the users saw it they asked for a "Stop"
  button like the existing system had so they could abort
  long-running queries. Then we went over where to put it
  with me running queries. They gave up on the idea because
  the data was returned too fast for them to hit a button.
  
  Through 4+ weeks of User Acceptance Testing ("UAT") they
  asked for a few dozen changes in the reports. Few of them
  took loger than 20 minutes to implement. In several cases
  they got annoyed that the company email took longer to
  deliver the fix notice than make the change.
  
  Using Perl we were also able to handle the database
  manglement software for tablespace and table creation,
  web site auth. and reporting code and most of the ETL
  process management code in one language. That also
  saved us quite a bit of work.