Sounds like the stuff my code refactoring nightmares are made of. The opposite case is funny too though: I've seen people who fetched and deserialized the entire SQL table and then manually SELECTed by looping over it with a foreach loop and picking the right record =)

They even had their own custom logic to do table JOINs. It involved fetching and deserializing both entire tables with SELECT *, of course.

Relational calculus at its finest, me gusta.