2 The evolution of Postgres

Postgres started in 1986 as a research project led by Professor Michael Stonebraker at the University of California, Berkeley. It is called 'Postgres' as it was the successor to Ingres, one of the seminal relational databases inspired by the work of Edgar Codd. The team around Michael Stonebraker took several fundamental decisions that still influence PostgreSQL today and are foundational to its success: (1) chose an object-relational design that allows for easy adoption of new data types, and (2) leverage the operating system capabilities as much as possible and adhere to the POSIX interface standard to allow almost universal portability.Postgres was a research project until 1994, when it was spun out of the University of California and released under an extremely permissive open-source license, allowing a wide developer and user community to use and improve on it. This was likely another reason why Postgres became so widely successful.In 1996, a...