Internal Call Center Database

The URL is on an internal LAN for a company whose name
 I cannot use. The site gets up to a few hundred hits
 per second supporting a telephone call center database.
 My company was asked to develop a web
 front end onto a TB data warehouse. The existing system
 (carefully crafted in C) was so slow people couldn't
 get their work done (e.g., 45-minute query times). We
 re-did the back end and slapped an interface on it using
 mod_perl.

 The first time the users saw it they asked for a "Stop"
 button like the existing system had so they could abort
 long-running queries. Then we went over where to put it
 with me running queries. They gave up on the idea because
 the data was returned too fast for them to hit a button.

 Through 4+ weeks of User Acceptance Testing ("UAT") they
 asked for a few dozen changes in the reports. Few of them
 took loger than 20 minutes to implement. In several cases
 they got annoyed that the company email took longer to
 deliver the fix notice than make the change.

 Using Perl we were also able to handle the database
 manglement software for tablespace and table creation,
 web site auth. and reporting code and most of the ETL
 process management code in one language. That also
 saved us quite a bit of work.