Mike Stonebraker

He would ship stuff that didn't work

and have his initial customers help him debug it.

So I think he engaged in what I consider very shady business practices.

But lying to customers, I think, is unconscionable.

So for instance,

There was a thing called referential integrity, which is if you fire an employee and he's the last person in a given department, do you want to delete the department or do you want to have it be a department, a ghost department?

It's all that kind of stuff.

And so Ingress Corporation implemented referential integrity.

Oracle Corporation wrote two manual pages that said, here's the definition of referential integrity, which everybody agreed to.

And then down at the bottom it said, not yet implemented.

That was the genesis of Postgres replacing MySQL as the preferred open source relational database system.

was the original reasoning for the academic version of Ingress was we were going to support a geographic information system that the neighboring professor, Praveen Varaya, wanted.

And so, to support a GIS system, you need points, lines, polygons, line groups, that sort of stuff.

And it was clear that Ingress couldn't do it because

The data types we put into Ingress were the standard ones, integers, floats, text strings.

And you couldn't support, you couldn't efficiently support GIS types on top of that.

So as a GIS, the academic version of Ingress was a complete failure.

And that was in the back of our mind.

The other thing that happened, this is a little out of chronological sequence, but it helps make the point, is that the commercial version of Ingress, I think around 1985, ANSI had just proposed a date and time standard for relational databases.

And so commercial Ingress implemented date and time using the standard Gregorian calendar.