From a database point of view, a cemetery is an inventory management problem, albeit one where the inventory does not move around much.

designed, built, and maintained a cemetery management system. This was built in Ingres on an IBM RT125 running AIX. The system tracks 50,000 burials and 80,000 graves, integrating registration, care, and billing.

Why would a cemetery need to have a database?

From a database point of view, a cemetery is an inventory management problem, albeit one where the inventory does not move around much.

There was actually a fair amount of complexity to be managed, with the trail of occupancy and ownerships of sets of graves often representing a kind of family history in miniature. And from a legal point of view, each grave is a small, independent piece of real estate. Title to each grave has to be carefully tracked: when a grave opening is requested, the cemetery has a fiduciary responsibility to be sure that the person making the request is in fact legally entitled to do so.

Every line of work has its own special requirements; a cemetery is no exception. Since the system was for a Jewish cemetery, it had to be run in compliance with Rabbinical law.

For example, one question was "is the computer allowed to run on the Sabbath?"

After some debate we decided it was -- provided the jobs in question had been started or at least scheduled before the Sabbath.