On 25/4/2006 6:47, "Tom Lane" <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Shane Ambler <pgsql@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: >> If you look at the history of PostgreSQL you will find that the development >> at Berkley started with Ingres and after the code was used to start >> Relational Technologies/Ingres Corporation the Postgres project was born. >> A later version of Postgres was used by Illustra Information Technologies >> which later merged into Informix and is now owned by IBM. >> This gives you some some indication of the quality - two commercial >> databases have been started with PostgreSQL code. > > Actually that's a misstatement --- AFAIK, Stonebraker and crew started > from scratch when they wrote Postgres, because they wanted to experiment > with a new system design based on what they'd learned while writing > Ingres. So there's no code shared between Ingres and Postgres, and > probably not much design commonality either, other than having sprung > from largely the same group of people. Bruce Momjiam say's "PostgreSQL's ancestor was Ingres" but I haven't found anything concrete one way or the other on whether Postgres started from scratch or from Ingres code (the name comes from 'post' 'gres' - after Ingres) > Illustra/Informix, on the other hand, is indeed a fork of Postgres. > I don't know how similar that code base now is to ours, though. There's > been enough time for pretty substantial divergence on both sides of the > fork. True but if the early code was good enough to make a commercial product (regarded as one of the first commercially successful relational databases) then it gives you some indication of the quality the project started from. Starting from a bad bug ridden beginning could carry problems through to today's version.
