Quick questions about postgres name?

Hi

út 23. 9. 2025 v 6:07 odesílatel Dan Mahoney (Gushi) <postgres@gushi.org>
napsal:

Hey there folks,

The manual contains a "Brief History" of postgres and notes that the name
Postgres was retained as an official name after Postgres95 added official
SQL support, and because 95 wouldn't stand the test of time.

It makes mention of the original professor who spearheaded the project
under a DARPA grant, but it would probably do well to know where the name
came from.

If there's somewhere where this should be suggested, let me know.

(Wikipedia has some of this history --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database))

I wrote an article about PostgreSQL history
https://postgres.cz/wiki/Historie_projektu_PostgreSQL

It is in Czech language, but google translator almost works for translation
from Czech to English.

There is a list of used literature

"Dan Mahoney (Gushi)" <postgres@gushi.org> writes:

It makes mention of the original professor who spearheaded the project
under a DARPA grant, but it would probably do well to know where the name
came from.

You should read Joe Hellerstein's recollections [1]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.01973. But tl;dr: the
origin of the name is the old INGRES database system; Postgres was
then named Post-inGres. There are also some references to PostQUEL
referring to the ancient QUEL (QUEry Language) project [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages.

regards, tom lane

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.01973
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages

regards, tom lane

On 9/22/25 21:06, Dan Mahoney (Gushi) wrote:

Hey there folks,

The manual contains a "Brief History" of postgres and notes that the
name Postgres was retained as an official name after Postgres95 added
official SQL support, and because 95 wouldn't stand the test of time.

It makes mention of the original professor who spearheaded the project
under a DARPA grant, but it would probably do well to know where the
name came from.

If there's somewhere where this should be suggested, let me know.

(Wikipedia has some of this history -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ingres_(database))

A more direct link is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)

-Dan

--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.klaver@aklaver.com

On 2025-Sep-23, Tom Lane wrote:

"Dan Mahoney (Gushi)" <postgres@gushi.org> writes:

It makes mention of the original professor who spearheaded the project
under a DARPA grant, but it would probably do well to know where the name
came from.

You should read Joe Hellerstein's recollections [1]. But tl;dr: the
origin of the name is the old INGRES database system; Postgres was
then named Post-inGres.

INGRES itself is an acronym, and reportedly it has nothing to do with
the French painter; quoth
https://ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au/~yuan/ingres/ingres.faq.html:

| Trivium: INGRES is an acronym for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System
| (revealing the nature of the project out of which the experiments with
| relational databases arose). By happy accident, there was also a
| French artist by the same name: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
| (1780-1867). (A highly placed source who wishes to remain anonymous
| confirms that the selection of the name WAS an accident.)

There are also some references to PostQUEL referring to the ancient
QUEL (QUEry Language) project [2].

The same documented cited above says:

| 01.005 Does OpenIngres support SQL?

| OpenIngres supports SQL. OpenIngres 1.x is compliant with the ANSI/ISO
| Entry-Level SQL92 (SQL2) standard and also has some of the
| Intermediate-Level features. Embedded SQL and embedded Dynamic SQL are
| also fully supported. (See section 05.003 below for SQL2 references.)

| Note that OpenIngres also supports QUEL and embedded QUEL, which it
inherits from University Ingres. Computer Associates de-emphasizes
QUEL for obvious commercial reasons. Because QUEL has considerable
| technical advantages over SQL, OpenIngres adopted SQL relatively late
| (c. 1986) and perhaps for this reason there is a lingering
| misapprehension that OpenIngres still does not support SQL.

University Ingres supports only QUEL and embedded QUEL. (See 03.006
for a description of `onyx' which provides an SQL to QUEL interface for
University Ingres.)

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Puedes vivir sólo una vez, pero si lo haces bien, una vez es suficiente"

On 9/23/25 05:17, Tom Lane wrote:

"Dan Mahoney (Gushi)" <postgres@gushi.org> writes:

It makes mention of the original professor who spearheaded the project
under a DARPA grant, but it would probably do well to know where the name
came from.

You should read Joe Hellerstein's recollections [1]. But tl;dr: the
origin of the name is the old INGRES database system; Postgres was
then named Post-inGres. There are also some references to PostQUEL
referring to the ancient QUEL (QUEry Language) project [2].

I remember back in school (circa 1987) in the course of data structures,
the topic of tree traversal using the 3 recursive methods : pre-order,
in-order and post-order was quite popular back then, in this spirit,
indeed, Postgres sounds like the next step of Ingres, but this is my
sole impression !