How'd this get started?: Marc Fournier - Project Founder:
"In my case, it was looking for a database backend for an ISP accounting
system way back in '95/'96 ... mySQL couldn't stand up to the load we were
expecting, so we looked at Postgres95 ... at the time, Jolly/Andrew were
'ghosts' flittering about (finishing their thesis and getting ready to
move on), but there seemed a relatively active community of users ... It
had the features that I needed, and ppl like Bruce had the patches, so I
offered the resources to pull it altogether ... at which point I was
hooked."
Elein Mustain - Long-Time PostgreSQL Community Member:
"I have worked as a developer on another postgres based product,
at Illustra and another similiar object-relational
database, Informix 9. I also worked with an excellent
relational databases as a developer with Ingres.
Choosing to work with PostgreSQL was a 'no-brainer'.
I would never, with this experience, choose database
that is not cleanly extensible or that
does not have fully functional relational capabilities."
What do you think are its best features?
Marc Fournier:
"Hard to answer, as there are so many ... for us, schema's have been great
(and visible) feature, since we use it extensively for AMS ."
Elein Mustain:
"Extensibility!
The rich set of procedural languages enables more
developers to take advantage of postgresql's
enhanced functional capabilities. Functions can be
written in the language most suited for the task at hand.
User Defined Data Types and User Defined Operators
are nicely implemented so that you can create
data types with functionality more suited to the business
objects being stored, queried and manipulated by SQL.
PostgreSQL is also technologically mature and stable
while its ideas and implementation remain leading edge.
Its competitors are commercial vendors with many resources.
However PostgreSQL achieves this with excellent core team
coordination of the product, particularly Tom Lane.
PostgreSQL is on an upswing and has a great deal
of good will and enthusiasm along with fast paced
development."
Neil Conway - Major Contributor to PostgreSQL:
"I've always been impressed by the commitment to "doing things right"
that is pervasive among PostgreSQL developers. There is an emphasis on
code quality, stability, and good style that I think has contributed
enormously to the final product."
What is Cooking for future releases? (> 8.0)
Neil Conway:
"Predicting future development in detail is always difficult with a
project consisting largely of volunteers. I think we're getting close to
wrapping up the remaining important OLTP features; there are still some
things we need to add, but we're definitely closing the gap. We've spent
less time working on OLAP and ORDBMS features in the past few years --
that might be an area that will see more work as we our OLTP features
mature. Another area might be improving the performance of PostgreSQL on
high-end hardware (many-way SMP), as well as an effective,
high-performance multi-master replication system."
Josh Berkus - PostgreSQL Core Team member:
"For our next major version (which might be either 8.1 or 8.2) we can only
forcast the features based on what's already been submitted or at least
debated. That includes speed improvements in R-Tree and GiST indexes (which
Neil is too modest to talk about), two-phase commit, SQL2003 standard
compliant procedures (current procedures have non-standard syntax), database
roles, and of course more improvements in memory usage. Given that we
released 8.0 less than a month ago, though, it's still early in the cycle so
no doubt we'll get more; and no doubt some of the above won't make it."
What do you consider its biggest challenger?
Elein Mustain:
"To substantially increase PostgreSQL's visibility.
PostgreSQL should be included on everyone's "list
of databases" and it should be spelled correctly.
I don't want to go to any conference representing
PostgreSQL and be asked what it is and why haven't
people heard of it."
