40 Years of Postgres: Pages 9

A developer provisions a Heroku Postgres database in one step in 2011; in 2012 the developer tests against a forked copy while the live database keeps running; a laptop on a kitchen table shows Postgres.app as a single elephant icon in the Mac dock; a bottom strip pairs Heroku (Y Combinator 2008) with Supabase (Y Combinator 2020).

Looking back, a builder gathers the few filled cells of a sparse table into a compact drawer labeled hstore; in 2012 a JSON document is stored unchanged in a sleeve and reparsed for each operation; in 2014 the same document is split into binary value blocks connected directly to an index, labeled JSONB.

Developer experience arrives

Heroku launched Heroku Postgres as a standalone service in 2011: a database in one step, with followers and one-command forks soon after. In 2012 a Heroku engineer released Postgres.app, a local server in one click. Heroku (W08) and Supabase (S20) are both Y Combinator companies built around Postgres developers.

Sources

Heroku Postgres Launches (Heroku blog, 2011)
Fork Your Application's Data (Heroku blog, 2012)
Postgres.app: the easiest way to develop with Postgres on a Mac (2012)
Heroku on Y Combinator (Winter 2008)
Supabase on Y Combinator (Summer 2020)

JSON(B) moves in

A table of mostly empty cells inspired hstore, a key-value type added in 2006. PostgreSQL 9.2 (2012) added a json type that kept the original text. 9.4 (2014) added JSONB, parsed once into a binary form that supports indexes. Tables and documents could now live together.

Sources

PostgreSQL 8.2 release notes: hstore added to contrib (2006)
PostgreSQL 9.2.0 release notes: json type (2012)
Commit: Introduce jsonb, a structured format for storing json (2014)
PostgreSQL 9.4.0 release notes: JSONB (2014)
JSON types (official documentation)

Developer experience arrives

Sources

JSON(B) moves in

Sources

Solutions & Platform

Resources

Change Management

Access & Security

AI & Agents

Comparisons

Company

Legal