[flowerbreeze]

I've only given up trying to understand a system once. It was when I was handed over an application that used stored procedures for everything. Including recursive stored procedures... The rest could be figured out, but they were just too much.

[jwmcq]

I feel this. Once had something locking up a production SQL Server instance, and it turned out to be a dreadful partially-recursive web of sprocs, views, and TVFs that worked fine until apparently one day the query optimiser decided otherwise. Spent hours tracing what the heck was going on.