Sigh, if only. OK, so the rest of the story was that the original app was written in Visual FoxPro. I was hired to build a web frontend for it. Well, turns out 1) there is, or at least was, no native VFP client for Unix, and 2) the Windows client was single threaded per host, so you couldn't even farm the connectivity out to a Windows process. After struggling with this for a while -- a cluster of Win XP hosts running a single-threaded VFP client and serving results to a Linux webserver via XMLRPC, as was the custom at the time -- I finally said "screw this, let's brute force it." That turned into https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf, which is an app to convert a VFP table into a PostgreSQL table. We had it running on a cron job, which worked fine because the website was read-only and it was the VFP app that was actually writing to the tables. It was alright to have up to a few hours of latency between the VFP view of the data and the PostgreSQL view of it.

When the company later committed to rewriting the VFP app in a sane language, they wrote it to run directly against PostgreSQL. That was quite a few years after I'd started there, though.