How I Exposed an Entire PL/SQL-Based Application as REST APIs in Less Than a Week

#ICYMI: Back in the good(?) old days, PL/SQL applications that ran inside an Oracle DB were quite the thing. All the logic was written in the DB close to the data. And everything ran fast. Stuff like maintainability, lighter open source databases, modern APIs, microservices, etc. only emerged later.

I used to work for a company with such an application and the company encountered a problem — an old PL/SQ- based application was in an un-maintainable state (people who even knew PL/SQL became scarce), the application could not be offered to new customers due to its old technology, and even existing clients demanded modern REST APIs to integrate with the system. An estimation of manually exposing REST APIs for each PL/SQL procedure (we had almost 10000 of those) was a year of work for three developers. But during this time, the application will still be un-sellable, and existing customers might not be patient enough and dump us for a shinier application — the situation looked dire. Then I came and said, “I can expose all PL/SQL procedures in less than a week!” And I did. This is how: https://goo.gl/gw3G6z