Re: postgresql -- what's in a name?

Hi,

Below is a short history of PostgreSQL. I am not the author, and do not
remember where I got these...

Regards,
Devrim
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A short history of PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL can trace its family tree back to 1977 at the University of
California at Berkeley (UCB). A relational database called Ingres was
developed at UCB between 1977 and 1985. Ingres was a popular UCB export,
making an appearance on very many UNIX computers in academic and research
communities. To serve the commercial marketplace the code for Ingres was
taken by Relational Technologies/Ingres Corporation and became one of the
first commercially available relational database management systems. Today
Ingres has become CA-INGRES II a product from Computer Associates. It is
hard to say whether any of the original UCB code still survives in this
modern day product.

Meanwhile, back at Berkeley work on a relational database server called
Postgres continued from 1986 to 1994. Again, this code was taken up by a
commercial company and offered for sale as a product. This time it was
Illustra, since swallowed up by Informix.

Around 1994 SQL features were added to Postgres and its name was changed
to Postgres95.

By 1996 Postgres was becoming very popular and the decision was taken to
open up its development to a mailing list, starting what has become a very
successful collaboration of volunteers in driving Postgres forward. At
this time Postgres underwent its final name change, ditching the now dated
‘95’ tag for a more appropriate ‘SQL’ to reflect the support Postgres now
had for the query language standard. So was PostgreSQL born.

Today a team of Internet developers develops PostgreSQL in much the same
manner as other Open Source software such as Perl, Apache and PHP. Users
have access to the source code and contribute fixes, enhancements and
suggestions for new features. The official PostgreSQL releases are made
via the PostgreSQL.org website.

Commercial support is available from Great Bridge, who also employ some of
the PostgreSQL developers too. See the Resources section at the end of the
chapter for more details.

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Devrim GUNDUZ

devrim(at)oper(dot)metu(dot)edu(dot)tr
devrim(dot)gunduz(at)linux(dot)org(dot)tr
devrimg(at)tr(dot)net

Web : http://devrim.oper.metu.edu.tr
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