For my senior level software development class, one of our tasks was to write a simple database system that was most definitely declared to NOT be a subset of t

For my senior level software development class, one of our tasks was to write a simple database system that was most definitely declared to NOT be a subset of the SQL language, because subsets of SQL were expressly forbidden. Ours was called the Network Query Language. Most of the other teams were taking the commands as they were entered and saving them to a file. Then you could reply the file when you restarted, and then continue to proceed with processing new commands. I had the bright idea to write a memory management routine using handles, so that we could do a binary save of memory state, and then a binary read of memory state on restart. And it worked. We were only one of two teams to finish the project that year, and both of those teams got A's. The other team who finished was made up exclusively of people who were Student Assistants in the Engineering Computer Network system downstairs, and so they had SysAdmin privileges on the Encore MultiMax where we were all writing our code. And some of them had some real world systems programming experience. But ours was the only team who had a memory manager and did binary saves and reads of the entire database state. The other teams would take a long time to replay all the commands on restart, and that delay just kept getting longer and longer as more commands were entered. That still stands out in my mind as one of my better ideas I've had with regards to computer programming, and one of my proudest experiences. Sadly, none of the teams got to do a readout at the end where they discussed their experiences and the things they would do differently.