Seven Databases in Seven Weeks

That’s Post-greS-Q-L

So, What’s with the Name?

PostgreSQL has existed in the current project incarnation since 1995, but its roots are considerably older. The original project was written at Berkeley in the early 1970s and called the Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System, or “Ingres” for short. In the 1980s, an improved version was launched post-Ingres—shortened to Postgres. The project ended at Berkeley proper in 1993 but was picked up again by the open source community as Postgres95. It was later renamed to PostgreSQL in 1996 to denote its rather new SQL support and has remained so ever since.

PostgreSQL is by far the oldest and most battle-tested database in this book. It has plug-ins for natural-language parsing, multidimensional indexing, ...