Around the turn of the century I built a "middleware" layer for an Oracle to MySQL bridge which enabled legacy systems to keep running while modern and open source tooling could be built.

The biggest challenge was moving from columnar to row based data .. that and compiling Solaris tools using Oracle libraries.

Oracle is like sendmail, user friendly, just very picky whom it makes friends with.

I'm getting flashbacks to debugging an Oracle connection file.

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 11 points 1 day ago

We had an application with tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL code.

We also had the boss who demanded "database agnostic" development. So we had to write the whole thing a second time in T-SQL.

I'm so happy I switched jobs. But I guess I learned a lot in that time.