Postgres Pioneer Promises To Upend The Database Once More
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Celebrating his 80th birthday this year, Michael Stonebraker continues with his work in database research, but his mark on the industry has been cemented with PostgreSQL, the open source relational database system which, for the first time, became the most popular choice of database among developers this year, according to the 2023 Stack Overflow survey. As well as a popular open source DBMS, vendors including the cloud hyperscalers, CockroachDB and YugabyteDB all offer database services with a PostgreSQL compatible front end.
Stonebraker's first influential work started with Ingres, the early relational database system, which began as his research topic following his appointment as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley in 1971.
Speaking to The Register, he says: "My PhD thesis was on an aspect of Markov chains, and that, I realized, had no practical value whatsoever. I went to Berkeley, and you've got five years to make a contribution and get tenure. I knew it was not going to be my thesis topic. Then Eugene Wong, who was another faculty member at Berkeley, said, 'Why don't we look at databases?'"
The two read a then-recent proposal about relational databases from IBM researcher Edgar Codd called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks."
Stonebraker and Wong thought the Englishman's idea was elegant and simple. "The obvious question was to try and build a relational database system. Both Eugene and I had no experience building system software but, like academics, we thought, let's try it and see what happens. So, based on no experience, we set out to build Ingres. And that was what got me my tenure."
[...] But Stonebraker acknowledges the commercial codebase for Ingres was way ahead of the open source research project - other researchers could get the code for a nominal fee covering the tape required to store and the postal costs - so his team decided to push the code over a cliff and start all over again. What comes after Ingres? Postgres, obviously.
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