Hello All,
This is my first blog with postgresql-database.blogspot.in
What better to start with History of PostgreSQL.
The PostgreSQL originates from University of California at
Berkely, Computer Science Department. PostgreSQL is an open-source descendant
of this original Berkeley code. Sometime People refer PostgreSQL as Postgres,
or some time Postgre too! But I believe it doesn’t make any change as long as
the meaning of these words are same and they all mean PostgreSQL database
Many few know, The father of many databases in today’s world
and his name is Dr. Michael Stonebraker. The POSTGRES project was led by Dr.
Michael Stonebraker and was sponsored by 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. 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. The size of the external user community nearly doubled during 1993.
It became increasingly obvious that maintenance of the prototype code and
support was taking up large amounts of time that should have been devoted to
database research. In an effort to reduce this support burden, the Berkeley POSTGRES
project officially ended with Version 4.2.
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.
Postgres 95
In 1994, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen added an SQL language
interpreter to POSTGRES. Under a new name, Postgres95 was subsequently released
to the web to find its own way in the world as an open-source descendant of the
original POSTGRES Berkeley code. You will be amazed to know, Andrew Yu and
Jolly Chen were Ph.D student from Stonebraker’s Lab
Postgres95 code was completely ANSI C and trimmed in size by
25%. Many internal changes improved performance and maintainability. Postgres95
release 1.0.x ran about 30-50% faster on the Wisconsin Benchmark compared to POSTGRES,
Version 4.2.
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. It was during this phase
that query language SQL was implemented, psql interactive program was
implemented and many good implementations.
PostgreSQL
By 1996, it became clear that the name "Postgres95"
would not stand the test of time. They chose a new name, PostgreSQL, to reflect
the relationship between the original POSTGRES and the more recent versions
with SQL capability. At the same time, they set the version numbering to start
at 6.0, putting the numbers back into the sequence originally begun by the
Berkeley POSTGRES project.
Every year PostgreSQL community has two releases one in the
month of May and the other around the month of September. The PostgreSQL developer
community is the world’s largest community in building an open source project. With
this strength, I believe PostgreSQL in future has no boundaries for success
And here they are today with Version 9.3 Beta released to
the World audience.
I hope this post was interesting and will cultivate your
interest in this database.
Thank you
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