Hello Postgresers, I don't know where better to post this, but feel free to forward this on elsewhere. I haven't seen anything on this posted in Postgres circles (though I might have missed it!), so I thought someone should. What follows is about two pages of PostgreSQL's (pre?) history (including a little on server internals that might be of interest to some) followed by an invitation to a public lecture with reception/celebration, and an announcement of a new endowment in support of undergraduate and first-year graduate student research in database management systems. Attached below my text are two emails from coleagues from the early days discussing the lecture that you might find interesting reading. Old timers here probably know something about Postgres' early history. Some of us, like myself, have had some direct involvement, though I have never taken a role with PostgreSql, nor was I a student involved with Postgres. I got involved in 1989 when I joined RTI reporting to the VP level and became more closely involved when Mike Stonebraker hired me to lead a project for him at UCB while the Postgres project was still funded. I would love to know something more of PostgreSql.org's history, but, at the risk of some error, I can give you a basic outline of the early history of Postgres - how it came to be. Please correct me if I happen to err... It _should_ go without saying that Postgres was the follow-on project - and inheritor of the intellectual capital - from Ingres at the University California, Berkeley, led by Professor Michael Stonebraker... "Back in the day," in the late 1970s, Mike became interested in the concept of the relational database and his team of students was one of the leading research groups. They named their project "Ingres" after a French painter - pre-impressionist, I believe. "University Ingres" is widely considered the first successful implementation of a relational database engine and its public domain source code was the starting code line for Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Britton Lee and a few other popular commercial RDBMSes, as well as Postgres in all its forms. In 1976, Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, Peter Kreps and Jerry Held published a paper titled "The Design and Implementation of Ingres", and it wasn't long until companies like Oracle and Britton Lee were commercializing this work. So, in 1980, Mike and some of his students started a company known as Relational Technology Inc., RTI (later Ingres Corporation) and made their own commercial implementation. Their version, known simply as "Ingres," was fantastic, widely considered the best product by far in the industry. I joined RTI in 1989, just as "Release 6" was being introduced. As many here are internals-oriented, it's worth a brief digression on the internals; Given the compute resources of the day, Release 6 used a multi-server, multi-threaded architecture that used shared memory and semaphores on Unix based platforms, and a device driver on VMS, for interprocess communications. It was a miniature operating system, complete with internally managed threads, slaves for asynchronous I/O, and a half-dozen or so "facilities" providing a clean interface for thread management. One main codeline was written against a "compatibility library" that resolved differences between system flavors, and "porting" to a new platform was mostly all about modifying the CL as appropriate. The servers internal facilities included such as PF, the Parser Facility, OPF, the Optimizer Facility, QEF, the Query Execution Facility, DMF, the Data Manipulation Facility, and so forth. In production, heavily loaded, highly concurrent environments especially, it was the "cat's meow." Importantly, the genius Eric Lundblad contributed a wonderful statistics based optimizer that kept track of the domains of table attributes using histograms. This permitted the cost-based optimizer facility to evaluate and choose a query plan based upon estimated CPU and I/O costs of performing a query in alternative ways. For example, projection and restriction steps whose estimates were smallest were very nearly always chosen to be performed first, and if they could be fetched from an index, so much the better, especially if it could avoid access to the underlying table. While other systems required query authors to understand the implications of the order used in the way they wrote their queries - called manual query optimization - Ingres gave outstanding performance even when the query was written in the worst possible way. ...As I did comparative benchmarks for marketing occasionally, I can tell you that Ingres beat its best competition by more than 10X, and sometimes more than 100X in nearly all real-world scenarios, even with outstanding manual query optimization. After the commercialization of Ingres, the University Ingres team continued on. In an effort to keep leading the way, Mike's UCB team moved into expanding datatypes. After not very long, they had added "Universal Data Types" to University Ingres, along with functions and operators needed to make them work. This was quickly adopted by the commercial Ingres team, then known as Ingres Corporation. I really don't recall just what the timing was but I think the Berkeley team, after UDT development but before commercialization, realized that they could rewrite University Ingres to use the whole set of UDT concepts throughout the project, and they felt it deserved a new name - I think this also coincided with a switch in grant money... Since it was now "after Ingres", someone came up with the name Postgres, and it stuck. I vaguely recall seeing t-shirts with the new name in 1992 - "PostgreSql", "Postgres the Sequel", they proclaimed. In 1993, as I recall, one of my reports at Ingres, Paul Brown, left my group to join Mike's team at UCB, and the following year, after Ingres was bought by Computer Associates, Mike convinced me to lead a research team for him at UCB, working right along side the Postgres folks. However, by the time the bureaucratic wheels turned enough for Mike to hire me as a researcher with managerial authority, the Postgres team was already winding down. I think they had grant money through to September or November of '94, but in any case, Paul was the last Postgres-hire (a paid researcher), and, thankfully, left them to join my team immediately - along with Turing Award-winner Jim Gray, among others. I lost Paul again when he jumped ship about a year later to go to Illustra, the company Mike founded for the commercialization of Postgres. Within a handfull of months after Paul joined them, Illustra was bought by Informix, who tried to integrate Illustra with their RDBMS. In short, I think their integration lost the best of Postgres by keeping the worst parts of both systems, if you were to ask me, but either way Informix went on to be bought by IBM. (Meanwhile, I kept on working for Mike at UCB, later getting my own grants, and finally commercializing my own work by founding Science Tools...) So, here it is all these years later. Someone else will have to step in and tell us how this Postgres Open-Source movement got started, if any of the folks had connections to UCB, the original Postgres team, and so forth. I can't tell you anything about that. What I can add, however, is that there will be a public lecture given by Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong, Peter Kreps and Jerry Held regarding their paper "The Design and Implementation of INGRES" on Wednesday, Nov 29th, at Soda Hall, UC Berkeley, with reception to follow immediately thereafter. More information and (free) registration is here: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/INGRES30/ I think you have until the first of November to register. Below are some emails that you may find of some interest on this same subject. Note that the Ingres community, some twelve plus years after the company's demise, still hangs to gether as Ex-Ingres - "Ingres Corporate Culture without the corporation!" In closing, I'd very much enjoy meeting folks from the PostgreSql team, especially the core members. You'll find me at this talk/reception - hope to see you there. Regards, Richard -- Richard Troy, Chief Scientist Science Tools Corporation 510-924-1363 or 202-747-1263 rtroy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://ScienceTools.com/ -- From: elein <elein at varlena.com> To: exingres at exingres.org Subject: [ExIngres] Invitation to Stonebraker/Wong/Held/Kreps lecture at UCB I received this message from Dr. Paula Hawthorn who is involved in setting up the endowment fund mentioned below. She asked me to forward it to this list since the subject may be near and dear to the database fans among us as well as the people who worked at INGRES early on. Please feel free to forward the message to others who may be interested. It will be great to give the *original* INGRES some credit it deserves as well as to give a hand to the next generation of database geeks. --elein elein at varlena.com Dear Friends: This year marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of the paper "The Design and Implementation of INGRES". To mark this occasion, Cal EECS is inviting the authors, Michael Stonebraker, Gene Wong, Jerry Held and Peter Kreps to give a Distinguished Lecture this fall. You are invited to both the lecture and the reception that will follow. The lecture will begin at 4PM on Wednesday, Nov. 29, the reception shortly after. If you are planning to attend, it is important that you register for the reception by October 1. For details, and to register, go to http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/INGRES30/ At the reception, Mike & Gene's students & colleagues will be announcing the UC Berkeley College of Engineering Mike Stonebraker-Eugene Wong Endowment Fund. The proceeds from this Fund will go to support UCB undergraduate and first-year graduate student research in database management systems. Funds for the support of undergraduate and first-year graduate students are currently hard to obtain, so the faculty are very supportive of this, as are Gene & Mike. The students who receive the funds will be chosen by the DBMS faculty, working with the Department Chair. To donate to this Endowment, go to http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/INGRES30/ The first 20 people who donate $1,000 or more will receive parking passes! We'll see you at the reception! Paula ____________________________________________________________ Exingres -- Ingres corporate culture without the corporation For more ExIngres services, see http://ExIngres.org/ -- Richard Troy, Chief Scientist Science Tools Corporation 510-924-1363 or 202-747-1263 rtroy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://ScienceTools.com/
