Having started my db work in EXEC, REXX, RAMIS (sp?), and the like, then moving on to procedural programming languages in college, Modula-2 for the most part, after college moving to Sybase, and eventually MSSQL 4.3... I think I know the disconnect. Someone stated before, the problem is in the mindset. Having been the hired gun in a few shops (consultant), I can say that the biggest problem I see is developers who can not break free of the procedural, RBAR (thanks) mindset.

The developers can not or will not think in sets.

The most recent, and one of the most painful examples is a db tracking certain events. The db is ~600GB, grows about 10 GB a week, adding some 5M rows a day. For whatever reason, the app developers decided to CLUSTER the index on a GUID, and then they wrote an archival routine to remove old data via a cursor, row by row by row by...

The data was coming in more than 10x faster than it could be deleted. I rewrote the procedure(s) and introduced small batches to the idea... Now, the test machines could delete everything they need to (on going) in about 30 minutes.

Haven't heard if it's been tested in production yet.

I should really finish that education I started... (Actually, I'm supposed to graduate this summer, it's only taken me 22 years.)