Re: 20th anniversary of PostgreSQL ?

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PostgreSQL, originally called Postgres, was created at UCB by a computer science professor named Michael Stonebraker, who went on to become the CTO of Informix Corporation. Stonebraker started Postgres in 1986 as a followup project to its predecessor, Ingres, now owned by Computer Associates. The name Postgres thus plays off of its predecessor (as in "after Ingres"). Ingres, developed from 1977 to 1985, had been an exercise in creating a database system according to classic RDBMS theory. Postgres, developed between 1986-1994, was a project meant to break new ground in database concepts such as exploration of "object relational" technologies.

Stonebraker and his graduate students actively developed Postgres for eight years. During that time, Postgres introduced rules, procedures, time travel, extensible types with indices and object-relational concepts. Postgres was later commercialized to become Illustra which was later bought by Informix and integrated into its Universal Server. Informix was purchased by IBM in 2001 for one billion dollars.

In 1995, two Ph.D. students from Stonebraker's lab, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen, replaced Postgres' POSTQUEL query language with an extended subset of SQL. They renamed the system to Postgres95.

In 1996, Postgres95 departed from academia and started a new life in the open source world when a group of dedicated developers outside of Berkeley saw the promise of the system, and devoted themselves to its continued development. Contributing enormous amounts of time, skill, labor, and technical expertise, this global development group radically transformed Postgres. Over the next eight years, they brought consistency and uniformity to the code base, created detailed regression tests for quality assurance, set up mailing lists for bug reports, fixed innumerable bugs, added incredible new features, and rounded out the system by filling various gaps such as documentation for developers and users.

The fruition of their labor was a new database that garnered a reputation for rock solid stability. With the start of its new life in the open source world, with many new features and enhancements, the database system took its current name: PostgreSQL. ("Postgres" is still used as an easy-to-pronounce nick-name.)

PostgreSQL began at version 6.0, giving credit to its many years of prior development

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