I'll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
Here's my favorite part. You obviously don't want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you're thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

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[–] quinkin@lemmy.world 26 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

XML-DOM page templates stored in a database, line by line.

So rendering a page started with:

select * from pages

where page_id = 'index'

order by line_number asc;

Each line of XML from each record was appended into a single string. This string was then XSLT transformed to HTML, for every page load.

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 11 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

This has to be one of the worst ways to reinvent a filesystem that I've ever heard. At the very least, storing static data in an relational database at this scale should be a slappable offense.

[–] quinkin@lemmy.world 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The session data, that would have been fantastic to have in a relational, queryable, reliable and trustable format was stored as a single giant string of PHP pickled data structure in a session file associated with the users cookie id.

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

This sentence has made me violently ill. Please take it back.