40 Years of Postgres: Pages 1

Young Michael Stonebraker and a colleague build Ingres in a 1970s Berkeley lab, puzzle over maps and engineering drawings, and sketch ideas at a chalkboard while the elephant watches; a small strip credits Stonebraker's 2014 Turing Award.

In 1986 a large POSTGRES blueprint is unrolled in the Berkeley lab; smaller panels show a new shape fitted into a workbench, a bell ringing when a record changes, and drawings lifted to reveal older versions underneath.

Before Postgres

In the 1970s Michael Stonebraker's team at Berkeley built Ingres, one of the first relational databases. It handled business records well but struggled with maps, engineering designs and scientific data. That gap became the brief for a successor. Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award.

Sources

The Design of POSTGRES (Berkeley technical report, 1986)
ACM press release: 2014 Turing Award (2015)
MIT News: Michael Stonebraker wins Turing Award (2015)

Postgres is born

Work on POSTGRES began at Berkeley in 1986. The founding paper proposed user-defined types and indexes, rules that fire when data changes, and storage that keeps old row versions. The last two ideas survive today as the rules system and MVCC. Berkeley's final release, 4.2, shipped in 1994.

Sources

The Design of POSTGRES (1986)
A Brief History of PostgreSQL (official documentation)

Before Postgres

Sources

Postgres is born

Sources

Solutions & Platform

Resources

Change Management

Access & Security

AI & Agents

Comparisons

Company

Legal