40 Years of Postgres: Pages 13

Three workbenches on one continuous foundation: a planner marks places and routes on a city map (PostGIS 2001); an operator reads a fast stream of readings laid along a timeline (TimescaleDB 2017); one mountain photo leads to three related but different mountain photos while the elephant observes (pgvector 2021).

Top row: a database cutaway shows a blue current row above gray older versions with a VACUUM arrow removing one, beside a newspaper clipping labeled Uber 2016 with the headline Marrying the dolphin, showing an Uber groom proposing to a dolphin while the elephant cries. Bottom row: three clients each connect to a separate process on the left, and three clients connect to three threads inside one process on the right.

One foundation. Many extensions.

The index interface planted in 1986 lets outsiders add whole workloads as packages. PostGIS (2001) brought maps, TimescaleDB (2017) time-series readings, and pgvector (2021) similarity search for AI, with its HNSW index added in 2023. Each is an extension; the core database stays the same.

Sources

PostGIS 0.1 pre-release announcement (May 31, 2001)
TimescaleDB launch announcement (April 4, 2017)
pgvector changelog: 0.1.0 first release (2021)
pgvector repository
pgvector 0.5.0 released with HNSW (postgresql.org, 2023)

The design debates

Two choices have been argued for decades. Postgres implements MVCC by writing a new row copy and leaving the old one for VACUUM, a cost Uber made public in 2016. And every connection gets its own process, a choice that kept the code simple; a 2023 proposal to move to threads has not shipped.

Sources

Uber: Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL (2016)
The Part of PostgreSQL We Hate the Most (Pavlo and Zhang, 2023)
How Connections Are Established (official documentation)
pgsql-hackers: Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded (2023)
Tom Lane on 30 years of Postgres architecture (2026)

One foundation. Many extensions.

Sources

The design debates

Sources

Solutions & Platform

Resources

Change Management

Access & Security

AI & Agents

Comparisons

Company

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