"I took over a Perl project where every SQL call was an exec to a java program which would make the query."

and

"Oh, and at the same time, none of this was in source control."

Owwww, that's painful! 12 people spaghetti Perl that did its DB lookups via Java and non of it in source control?

Owwww, owwww, owwww....