A Brief History of Postgres

As is the case with many open source projects, Postgres was originally developed in 1986 at the University of California at Berkley (UCB). Developed by Michael Stonebraker, a member of the computer science faculty, Postgres was designed as a follow-up to his previous database system, Ingres, which was acquired by Computer Associates.

Over the next eight years, Stonebraker and his students continued to innovate and extend Postgres with many features never seen before in a data management system. Later, a commercial version of Postgres was spun off and became the Illustra Database System, which was purchased by the Informix Corporation and integrated into its universal server product. In 2001, Informix was purchased by IBM for $1 billion.

In 1995, two of Stonebraker's students, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen, wrote the SQL interpreter within the core Postgres project and renamed the system Postgres95.

In 1996, Postgres95 was released into the open source community on a global scale, leaving its academic roots behind and entering a brave new world. Over the next eight years, Postgres95 was extended worldwide by an army of volunteers. During this time, the core server was made more stable, many regression tests and extensions were created for it, and much, much more.

The result has been a database system that is world-renowned as one of the most stable and feature-rich data management systems available today.

Today, PostgreSQL is monitored by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, managed primarily by EnterpriseDB. The code base takes regular contributions from CISCO, NTT Data, NOAA, Research in Motion, Google, Fujitsu, and many other large players in the IT marketplace.