That’s Post-greS-Q-L

So, What’s with the Name?

PostgreSQL has existed in the current project incarnation since 1995, but its roots go back much further. The project was originally created at UC Berkeley in the early 1970s and called the Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System, or “Ingres” for short. In the 1980s, an improved version was launched post-Ingres—shortened to “Postgres.” The project ended at Berkeley proper in 1993 but was picked up again by the open source community as Postgres95. It was later renamed to PostgreSQL in 1996 to denote its rather new SQL support and has retained the name ever since.

PostgreSQL is by far the oldest and most battle-tested database in this book. It has domain-specific plug-ins for things like natural language parsing, multidimensional indexing, geographic queries, custom datatypes, and much more. It has sophisticated transaction handling and built-in stored procedures for a dozen languages, and it runs on a variety of platforms. PostgreSQL has built-in Unicode support, sequences, table inheritance, and subselects, and it is one of the most ANSI SQL-compliant relational databases on the market. It’s fast and reliable, can handle terabytes of data, and has been proven to run in high-profile production projects such as Skype, Yahoo!, France’s Caisse Nationale d’Allocations Familiales (CNAF), Brazil’s Caixa Bank, and the United States’ Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

You can install PostgreSQL in many ways, depending on your operating system.[5] Once you have Postgres installed, create a schema called 7dbs using the following command:

​ ​$ ​​createdb​​ ​​7dbs​

We’ll be using the 7dbs schema for the remainder of this chapter.

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