I don't know, the contents of this article sound really inaccurate. There's no software counter that idiosyncratically stops at 40 million - maybe 4 billion was

I don't know, the contents of this article sound really inaccurate. There's no software counter that idiosyncratically stops at 40 million - maybe 4 billion was the real answer, and the reporter misread the digits. This sounds like a 32-bit TXID exhaustion bug in a Postgres database, which is a notorious and very difficult to recover from problem in live systems. It is probably the #1 arcane Postgres cataclysm. It would be consistent with how this is a "single coding error" (i.e., the call to VACUUM), additionally why it was so difficult to recover from ad-hoc. I'm generously assuming that everything else went well, that people who are building 911 systems aspire to do a really good job, and that it didn't fail anyone how important their work was. Which is funny, I mean what if Postgres "failed" for every TXID exhaustion cataclysm it had. Arguably the best database product in the world "failed" because of this. It probably provides more than a few billion dollars to our tech economy, on top of being the hub for research in databases - research whose goal is the same as the one as this paper, to use automation to reduce bureaucracy and improve society. Anyway we always imagine these rinky-dink consultant shops as writing all this custom stuff, and in actuality they are almost always combining a bunch open source and off the shelf things - which I would like to not see fail.