Using Perl 5 to make a program several hundred times faster

20 minutes

Any

English 

I had a program in a proprietary database language (PL-SQL like) that would have taken 60 days to run. Just unacceptable, especially for a program supposed to run once a month. Rewriting part of it in Perl 5 made it possible to run the whole lot in 12 to 13 hours. Actually, the part that took about 59.5 days of the total run time was brought down to one hour, i.e. a 1,400 times improvement. After that, most of my colleagues agreed to use Perl.