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CLASS="SECT1"
><H1
CLASS="SECT1"
><A
NAME="HISTORY"
>A Brief History of <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
></A
></H1
><P
> The object-relational database management system now known as
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
> is derived from the
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> package written at the
University of California at Berkeley. With over two decades of
development behind it, <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
> is now
the most advanced open-source database available anywhere.
</P
><DIV
CLASS="SECT2"
><H2
CLASS="SECT2"
><A
NAME="HISTORY-BERKELEY"
>The Berkeley <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> Project</A
></H2
><P
> The <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> project, led by Professor
Michael Stonebraker, was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (<ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>DARPA</ACRONYM
>), the Army Research
Office (<ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>ARO</ACRONYM
>), the National Science Foundation
(<ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>NSF</ACRONYM
>), and ESL, Inc. The implementation of
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> began in 1986. The initial
concepts for the system were presented in <A
HREF="biblio.html#STON86"
><I
><A
HREF="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M85-95.pdf"
TARGET="_top"
> The design of <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
>
</A
></I
></A
>,
and the definition of the initial data model appeared in <A
HREF="biblio.html#ROWE87"
><I
><A
HREF="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M87-13.pdf"
TARGET="_top"
> The <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> data model
</A
></I
></A
>. The design of the rule system at that time was
described in <A
HREF="biblio.html#STON87A"
><I
>The design of the <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> rules system</I
></A
>. The rationale and
architecture of the storage manager were detailed in <A
HREF="biblio.html#STON87B"
><I
><A
HREF="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M87-06.pdf"
TARGET="_top"
> The design of the <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> storage system
</A
></I
></A
>.
</P
><P
> <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> has undergone several major
releases since then. The first <SPAN
CLASS="QUOTE"
>"demoware"</SPAN
> system
became operational in 1987 and was shown at the 1988
<ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>ACM-SIGMOD</ACRONYM
> Conference. Version 1, described in
<A
HREF="biblio.html#STON90A"
><I
><A
HREF="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-34.pdf"
TARGET="_top"
> The implementation of <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
>
</A
></I
></A
>, was released to a few external users in
June 1989. In response to a critique of the first rule system
(<A
HREF="biblio.html#STON89"
><I
><A
HREF="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M89-82.pdf"
TARGET="_top"
> A commentary on the <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> rules system
</A
></I
></A
>), the rule system was redesigned (<A
HREF="biblio.html#STON90B"
><I
><A
HREF="http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-36.pdf"
TARGET="_top"
> On Rules, Procedures, Caching and Views in Database Systems
</A
></I
></A
>), 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 <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> (see below) focused on
portability and reliability.
</P
><P
> <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> 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.
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> has also been used as an
educational tool at several universities. Finally, Illustra
Information Technologies (later merged into
<A
HREF="http://www.informix.com/"
TARGET="_top"
><SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Informix</SPAN
></A
>,
which is now owned by <A
HREF="http://www.ibm.com/"
TARGET="_top"
>IBM</A
>) picked up the code and
commercialized it. In late 1992,
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> became the primary data manager
for the
<A
HREF="http://meteora.ucsd.edu/s2k/s2k_home.html"
TARGET="_top"
> Sequoia 2000 scientific computing project</A
>.
</P
><P
> 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
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> project officially ended with
Version 4.2.
</P
></DIV
><DIV
CLASS="SECT2"
><H2
CLASS="SECT2"
><A
NAME="HISTORY-POSTGRES95"
><SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
></A
></H2
><P
> In 1994, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen added an SQL language interpreter
to <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
>. Under a new name,
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> was subsequently released to
the web to find its own way in the world as an open-source
descendant of the original <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
>
Berkeley code.
</P
><P
> <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> code was completely ANSI C
and trimmed in size by 25%. Many internal changes improved
performance and
maintainability. <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> release
1.0.x ran about 30-50% faster on the Wisconsin Benchmark compared
to <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
>, Version 4.2. Apart from
bug fixes, the following were the major enhancements:
<P
></P
></P><UL
><LI
><P
> The query language PostQUEL was replaced with
<ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>SQL</ACRONYM
> (implemented in the server). Subqueries
were not supported until <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
>
(see below), but they could be imitated in
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> with user-defined
<ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>SQL</ACRONYM
> functions. Aggregate functions were
re-implemented. Support for the <TT
CLASS="LITERAL"
>GROUP BY</TT
>
query clause was also added.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> A new program
(<SPAN
CLASS="APPLICATION"
>psql</SPAN
>) was provided for interactive
SQL queries, which used <ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>GNU</ACRONYM
>
<SPAN
CLASS="APPLICATION"
>Readline</SPAN
>. This largely superseded
the old <SPAN
CLASS="APPLICATION"
>monitor</SPAN
> program.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> A new front-end library, <TT
CLASS="FILENAME"
>libpgtcl</TT
>,
supported <ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>Tcl</ACRONYM
>-based clients. A sample shell,
<TT
CLASS="COMMAND"
>pgtclsh</TT
>, provided new Tcl commands to
interface <SPAN
CLASS="APPLICATION"
>Tcl</SPAN
> programs with the
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> server.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> The large-object interface was overhauled. The inversion large
objects were the only mechanism for storing large objects. (The
inversion file system was removed.)
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> The instance-level rule system was removed. Rules were still
available as rewrite rules.
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> A short tutorial introducing regular <ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>SQL</ACRONYM
>
features as well as those of
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> was distributed with the
source code
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> <ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>GNU</ACRONYM
> make (instead of <ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>BSD</ACRONYM
>
make) was used for the build. Also,
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> could be compiled with an
unpatched <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>GCC</SPAN
> (data alignment of
doubles was fixed).
</P
></LI
></UL
><P>
</P
></DIV
><DIV
CLASS="SECT2"
><H2
CLASS="SECT2"
><A
NAME="AEN187"
><SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
></A
></H2
><P
> By 1996, it became clear that the name <SPAN
CLASS="QUOTE"
>"Postgres95"</SPAN
>
would not stand the test of time. We chose a new name,
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
>, to reflect the relationship
between the original <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> and the
more recent versions with <ACRONYM
CLASS="ACRONYM"
>SQL</ACRONYM
> capability. At
the same time, we set the version numbering to start at 6.0,
putting the numbers back into the sequence originally begun by the
Berkeley <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>POSTGRES</SPAN
> project.
</P
><P
> Many people continue to refer to
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
> as <SPAN
CLASS="QUOTE"
>"Postgres"</SPAN
>
(now rarely in all capital letters) because of tradition or because
it is easier to pronounce. This usage is widely accepted as a
nickname or alias.
</P
><P
> The emphasis during development of
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>Postgres95</SPAN
> was on identifying and
understanding existing problems in the server code. With
<SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
>, the emphasis has shifted to
augmenting features and capabilities, although work continues in
all areas.
</P
><P
> Details about what has happened in <SPAN
CLASS="PRODUCTNAME"
>PostgreSQL</SPAN
> since
then can be found in <A
HREF="release.html"
>Appendix E</A
>.
</P
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