“Many regard PostgreSQL as the state-of-the-art open source
database application. Its roots go back to 1977 at UC Berkeley, and
the story of how it reached its current status mirrors some of the
best success stories we’ve heard before in open source. If you’re
not familiar with PostgreSQL, this will give you a nice foundation
toward better understanding this truly remarkable
database.”
“PostgreSQL’s ancestor was Ingres, developed at the University
of California at Berkeley from 1977 to 1985. The Ingres code was
taken and enhanced by the Relational Technologies/Ingres
Corporation, which produced one of the first commercially
successful relational database servers. Also at Berkeley, Michael
Stonebraker led a team during the 1986 to 1994 period to develop an
object-relational database server called Postgres. The Postgres
code was taken by Illustra and developed into a commercial product.
Two Berkeley graduate students, Jolly Chen and Andrew Yu, added SQL
capabilities to Postgres during 1994 and 95 and called it
Postgres95. They left Berkeley, but Chen continued maintaining
Postgres95, which had an active mailing list.”
“In late 1996, we changed the name from Postgres95 to
PostgreSQL. It is a mouthful, but honors the Berkeley name and SQL
capabilities. We started distributing the source code using remote
cvs, which allowed people to keep up-to-date copies of the
development tree without downloading an entire set of files every
day. Releases occurred every 3 to 5 months. This time frame
consisted of 2-3 months of development, a month of beta testing, a
major release, and a few weeks to issue subreleases to correct
serious bugs.”