After the Postgres Project officially ended in 1994, the authors Jolly Chen and Andrew Yu saw a need to clean up the postgres code for their own needs. (Postgres needed to be extended for the Tioga and Mariposa research projects.) The postgres 4.2 code base had become bloated and unmanageable. Postgres95 (originally dubbed pglite) is a step towards making the code base extensible again, that is, extensible from the implementers' perspective. Also, there was (and still is) considerable interest in an SQL version so we made that happen.
Version 1.01 of Postgres95 was released on February 26, 1996. Version 1.0 of Postgres95 was released on September 5, 1995. Three beta releases were made before 1.0
POSTGRES has undergone several major releases since then. The first demo-ware system became operational in 1987 and was shown at the 1988 ACM-SIGMOD Conference. We released Version 1, described in `` The Implementation of POSTGRES'', to a few external users in June 1989. In response to a critique of the first rule system, the rule system was redesigned (`` On Rules, Procedures, Caching and view in Database Systems'') 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 rewrite rule system. For the most part, releases since then have focused on portability and reliability.
POSTGRES 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 informatics database and several geographic information systems. POSTGRES has also been used as an educational tool at several universities.
POSTGRES became the primary data manager for the Sequoia 2000 scientific computing project in late 1992. Furthermore, 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 project officially ended with Version 4.2.
Finally, Illustra Information Technologies, Inc.(a wholly owned subsidiary of Informix Software, Inc.) has picked up the prototype code and commercialized it.
The POSTGRES project, led by Professor Michael Stonebraker, was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and ESL, Inc.
POSTGRES was constructed by a team of undergraduate, graduate, and staff programmers at the University of California, Berkeley. Past Posthackers include Jeff Anton, Paul Aoki, James Bell, Jennifer Caetta, Philip Chang, Jolly Chen Ron Choi, Matt Dillon, Zelaine Fong, Adam Glass, Jeffrey Goh, Steven Grady, Serge Granik, Marti Hearst, Joey Hellerstein, Michael Hirohama, Chin-heng Hong, Wei Hong, Anant Jhingran, Greg Kemnitz, Marcel Kornacker, Case Larsen, Boris Livshitz, Jeff Meredith, Ginger Ogle, Michael Olson, Nels Olson, Lay-Peng Ong, Carol Paxson, Avi Pfeffer, Spyros Potamianos, Sunita Sarawagi, David Muir Sharnoff, Mark Sullivan, Cimarron Taylor, Marc Teitelbaum, Yongdong Wang, Kristin Wright and Andrew Yu.
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