Looking Back at Postgres

This is a recollection of the UC Berkeley Postgres project, which was led by Mike Stonebraker from the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's. The article was solicited for Stonebraker's Turing Award book, as one of many personal/historical recollections. As a result it focuses on Stonebraker's design ideas and leadership. But Stonebraker was never a coder, and he stayed out of the way of his development team. The Postgres codebase was the work of a team of brilliant students and the occasional university "staff programmers" who had little more experience (and only slightly more compensation) than the students.

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