History of PostgreSQL – Advantages and Applications

POSTGRES is currently known as PostgreSQL, an object-relational database management system. It was initially called Postgres because it was started as a follow-up effort and a post-Ingres project by a computer science professor named Michael Stonebraker at UCB.

It is a very stable database that has been developed by the open-source community for over 20 years. Many web apps, as well as mobile and analytics applications, use it as their primary database. It was founded in 1986 to address the shortcomings of the current database system. It was created to run on UNIX-like platforms. It was later developed to work on a variety of systems, including Windows, macOS, and Solaris.

History of PostgreSQL

The Beginning of a Community

Outside of academics, the initiative drew a lot of attention in 1996. The project was renamed as it became evident that the name Postgres95 would not stand the test of time. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group was formed, and it took responsibility for the codebase. For conformity with Berkeley versioning, it was begun at version 6, as a nod to Stonebraker’s team’s substantial contribution.

PostgreSQL 6

Many of the features that have come to define were developed during the early 6. * era of open source development, including:

• Controlling Concurrency in Multiple Versions
• Significant speed improvements have been accomplished.
• Built-in types have been improved, including more sophisticated date/time types and support for advanced geometric types.

PostgreSQL 7

The 7. * era was marked by several more watersheds for about 4 years and 5 major releases (7.0 – 7.4). These included the following:

• The most notable example is the early implementation of WAL (write-ahead logging).
• TOAST is a technique for compressing and storing huge data sets out-of-line so that they can be stored in a database table.
• Many procedural languages are based on Oracle, notably PL/PGSQL.

PostgreSQL 8

From 2004 to 2009, the 8. * line introduced features that were previously thought to be the exclusive domain of two or three megacorporation. It continues to be a major focus of 2ndQuadrant’s open-source efforts. The 8. * line is particularly important for establishing 2ndQuadrant, which was heavily involved in the development process from the start, commencing with the 8.0 release.

It offered more usability, developer-focused features, and performance enhancements, including:

• Windowing functions and Common Table Expressions are examples of more advanced SQL functionality.
• Restore in parallel
• The visibility map, which lowers vacuum overhead for tables that change slowly.
• The on-disk free space map, which has simplified the management of the free space map to the point where end-users never have to think about it.

PostgreSQL 9

For a variety of reasons, the 9. * line was a watershed moment in the community, most notably the introduction of straightforward, out-of-the-box streaming binary replication in 9.0. This was mostly a result of 2ndQuadrant’s efforts, as a logical extension of the company’s previous community work on WAL-related technologies, particularly 2ndQuadrant CTO Simon Riggs’ development of the Hot Standby feature.

Advantages of PostgreSQL

Open Source Code: It is provided for free under an open-source license. This gives you the flexibility to utilize, alter, and apply it as needed for your organization.

Cost-cutting: It is a true open-source solution, hence there are no license payments. You don’t have to be concerned about licensing fees, contract troubles, or dealing with a high-priced product any longer. It’s there when you want it and in the way you want it.

Security: There are numerous security features available. If you utilize the correct ones, though, you’ll have an extremely secure database that protects your most precious asset your data.

Scalability: Your database can expand to meet your needs. There are a variety of technological options for scaling PostgreSQL. As a result, your database will be able to scale up to meet your needs.

Applications of PostgreSQL

Financial Industry: The finance business is a great fit for PostgreSQL. Furthermore, it is fully ACID compliant, making it appropriate for OLTP workloads (Online Transaction Processing). On the other hand, it isn’t just a smart pick for its superior OLTP capabilities; it’s also a capable analytical database that works well with mathematical tools like Matlab and R.

GIS data from the government: It also has a GIS extension called “PostGIS” that has hundreds of functions for processing geometric data in multiple forms. The Open Source community provides sophisticated Geodata handling tools when used in conjunction with QGIS or GeoServer.

Manufacturing: Many world-class industrial manufacturers utilize PostgreSQL as a storage backend to accelerate innovation and drive growth through customer-centric operations, as well as to enhance supply chain performance. It is a long-term data store that provides your business with secure storage at a moderate cost.

As a result, it is the best option since it can be set up for automated failover, full redundancy, and updates with nearly little downtime.

NoSQL and web technology: Scalability is a major concern if your website must handle hundreds or even thousands of requests per second at any given time. It has been working hard to address those concerns in recent years. It is compatible with all modern web frameworks, including Django, Node.js, and others. Hibernate, PHP, and so on.

Scientific evidence: If you’re working on a study or scientific endeavor, you’ll need to generate terabytes of data. As a result, it’s critical to manage the most effective feasible. It has excellent analytical capabilities as well as a robust SQL engine for this purpose. This allows you to easily manage a vast volume of data.

PostgreSQL has a reputation for being a feature-rich, sophisticated relational database system. For many projects. If you require flexibility in how you represent data and want to be able to use a variety of tools and languages, hence it is a great choice. We hope this article helps you a lot in knowing the history of PostgreSQL, its advantages, and its applications.