spot on, and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa following suit

Hi, I've just moved across divisions at a big corporate bank, as a result of a request by the Divisional IT head... . .not that any of that is important :zzz: After spending almost 2 weeks here now, I've noticed somethign rather disturbing... 80% of the processing is being done on the SQL Server??? Admittingly . .the result of legacy, and based on the strengths of the senior developers here. The primary user application is a custom built VB.net/C# combo Windows application. But all its really used for is presentation of the ultimate results, all processing is handled by stored procedures within MSSQL Server 2000... :omg: . . including all : Batch processing (scheduled Stored Procedures that run for up to 7 days at a time!!), Text\XML file generation (tons of BCP commands, etc), Email\FTP management :omg: now.. i've been a software engineer for about 7 years.. and correct me if i am wrong.. but surely software practices have advanced a bit beyond this, and there are better ways to do all of these! My primary task for the first few weeks has been to do an assessment of the environment, and make some recommendations as to how things can be achieved in a better, more streamlined, more econmical manner. this is just one of the main issues we're facing here, source code repositories dont exist, no proper release and QA processes are in place.. blah blah blah... Alright.. enough blabbing, back to my original question... is SQL Server really the best place to conduct your primary business logic implementation?? I've always been of the opinion that stored procs should be used for CRUD, and only deviate from this when absolutely necessary... some advice please. . . Am I wrong here?