From time to time, some things just seem to fall into place, and then you can go around beaming feeling happy and at peace with the entire world :o) take last week as a point in case....
There are a couple of sub module teams, I happen to be in one, and we're way way behind on documenting the DB schema that we're building up.. ISO compliancy and other assorted details mean that we MUST have the documents ready, but all we had was a bunch of SQL scripts... Enter Perl :o)
Mmmmmmkay, Word documents needed huh ? build a quick and dirty SQL parser (yes, reinvent the wheel for the umpteenth time), generate some HTML pages with nicely formatted tables and stuff, use Win32::OLE to open the HTML in Word and do a Save-As... and what do you get ? A heap of nicely formatted documents describing the database schema. Its maintainable, its blindingly fast and I don't have to muck around updating documents for half the day..good stuff :o)
On a related note: why on earth would anyone want to have 5-10 long character strings as primary keys in a database... or refuse to use sequences to generate primary keys ?? these are just some of the "administrative" details of wading through the database schemas' that we intend to replace... ugh
And davorg's link to the IQ test: well, I figure that if I can score 121 while being distracted by my co-workers, then its not so bad :o), I was checking the wrong email address, as it turned out, but I can't imagine anyone taking the IQ test seriously..some questions were ridiculously easy while others were really hard :o) not at all consistent, and anyone repeating the test would have gotten more right... but it was fun :o)
