Joe recently worked on a financial system for processing loans. Like many such applications, it started its life many, many years ago. It began as an Oracle Forms application in the 90s. By the late 2000s, Oracle was trying to push people away from forms into their newer tools, like Oracle ApEx (Application Express), but this had the result of pushing people out of Oracle's ecosystem and onto their own web stacks.

The application Joe was working on was exactly that. Now, no one was going to migrate off of an Oracle database, especially because 90% of their business logic was wired together out of PL/SQL packages. But they did start using Java for developing their UI, and then at some other point, started using Liquibase for helping them maintain and manage their schema.

SQL Server Integration Services is Microsoft's ETL tool. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for describing data flows from sources to sinks, complete with transformations and all sorts of other operations, and is useful for migrating data between databases, linking legacy mainframes into modern databases, or doing what most people seem to need: migrating data into Excel spreadsheets.

It's essentially a full-fledged scripting environment, with a focus on data-oriented operations. The various nodes you can drag-and-drop in are database connections, queries, transformations, file system operations, calls to stored procedures, and so on. It even lets you run .NET code inside of SSIS.

Carol sends us today's nasty bit of code. It does the thing you should never do: serializes by string munging.

public string ToJSON()
{
    double unixTimestamp = ConvertToMillisecondsSinceEpoch(time);
    string JSONString = "{\"type\":\"" + type + "\",\"data\":{";
    foreach (string key in dataDict.Keys)
    {
        string value = dataDict[key].ToString();

        string valueJSONString;
        double valueNumber;
        bool valueBool;

        if (value.Length > 2 && value[0].Equals('(') && value[value.Length - 1].Equals(')')) //tuples
        {
            char[] charArray = value.ToCharArray();
            charArray[0] = '[';
            charArray[charArray.Length - 1] = ']';
            if (charArray[charArray.Length - 2].Equals(','))
                charArray[charArray.Length - 2] = ' ';
            valueJSONString = new string(charArray);
        }
        else if ((value.Length > 1 && value[0].Equals('{') && value[value.Length - 1].Equals('}')) ||
                    (double.TryParse(value, out valueNumber))) //embedded json or numbers
        {
            valueJSONString = value;
        }
        else if (bool.TryParse(value, out valueBool)) //bools
        {
            valueJSONString = value.ToLower();
        }
        else //everything else is a string
        {
            valueJSONString = "\"" + value + "\"";
        }
        JSONString = JSONString + "\"" + key + "\":" + valueJSONString + ",";
    }
    if (dataDict.Count > 0) JSONString = JSONString.Substring(0, JSONString.Length - 1);
    JSONString = JSONString + "},\"time\":" + unixTimestamp.ToString() + "}";
    return JSONString;
}