Years ago I worked in the VAX/VMS development group at Sybase where SQLServer originated. SQLServer was basically an SQL interpreter consisting of several layers of loops. The innermost loop was written in assembler for speed.
I was able to remove one (1) machine language instruction from that innermost loop. I no longer recall if this resulted in a measurable difference but I've always been proud of this.
Happy to read VAX/VMS here :-) - my first project as a college fresher was migrating critical data from VAX/VMS ISAM files (written using Fortran code) to Digital Unix. The days when these two machine's did not talk to each other. Learnt dd, tape drive record limiter issues, all data was floating point so issues with binary compatibility etc.
One of the best accomplishments in my career.
