McGoveran tackled the problem of view updating with Christopher J. Date starting in 1993 after having developed methods for reversible schema migration for clients on Wall Street. His solution, based on relation predicates, formed the basis for the algorithms found in The Third Manifesto (Christopher J. Date, Hugh Darwen) for updating virtual relations (e.g., views). Date has credited McGoveran with originally suggesting the basic idea for the view updating approach, and which Hugh Darwen says represented a major shift in thinking on the issue. This work has resulted in two patents (U.S. Patent 7,620,664 and U.S. Patent 7,263,512).