PostgreSQL 8.2.0 Documentation

Peter Kitson

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Sample Chapter From PostgreSQL 8.2.0 Documentation
Copyright © The PostgreSQL Global Development Group

2. A Brief History of PostgreSQL

The object-relational database management system now known as PostgreSQL is derived from the POSTGRES
package written at the University of California at Berkeley. With over a decade of development
behind it, PostgreSQL is now the most advanced open-source database available anywhere.

2.1. The Berkeley POSTGRES Project

The POSTGRES project, led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, was sponsored by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science Foundation
(NSF), and ESL, Inc. The implementation of POSTGRES began in 1986. The initial concepts for the
system were presented in The design of POSTGRES , and the definition of the initial data model appeared
in The POSTGRES data model . The design of the rule system at that time was described in The design
of the POSTGRES rules system. The rationale and architecture of the storage manager were detailed in
The design of the POSTGRES storage system .

POSTGRES has undergone several major releases since then. The first “demoware” system became operational
in 1987 and was shown at the 1988 ACM-SIGMOD Conference. Version 1, described in The
implementation of POSTGRES , was released to a few external users in June 1989. In response to a critique
of the first rule system ( A commentary on the POSTGRES rules system ), the rule system was redesigned
( On Rules, Procedures, Caching and Views in Database Systems ), and Version 2 was released in June
1990 with the new rule system. Version 3 appeared in 1991 and added support for multiple storage managers,
an improved query executor, and a rewritten rule system. For the most part, subsequent releases
until Postgres95 (see below) focused on portability and reliability.

POSTGRES has been used to implement many different research and production applications. These include:
a financial data analysis system, a jet engine performance monitoring package, an asteroid tracking
database, a medical information database, and several geographic information systems. POSTGRES has
also been used as an educational tool at several universities. Finally, Illustra Information Technologies
(later merged into Informix2, which is now owned by IBM3) picked up the code and commercialized it.
In late 1992, POSTGRES became the primary data manager for the Sequoia 2000 scientific computing
project4.