The dolphin logo for MySQL was created in 2001. As I was in the process of joining as CEO of the company, I asked the founders for their views on this topic. One of the co-founders, Monty, said “I like dolphins. They are fast, intelligent and kind. And in groups, they kill sharks.”

That was it. The decision was made.

We reached out to a graphics designer in Helsinki (Renne Angelvuo) to have the logo designed. We wanted a dolphin or a group of dolphins, and the designer created a number of variations of shape, type and color. He even modified the font to be specifically designed for the MySQL name.

A nearly final draft had the dolphin jumping from left to right (as is common in cultures where writing goes from left to right). We wanted to be more disruptive and different, so we asked Renne to make the dolphin jump from right to left. That’s how the logo was designed.

A couple of years later we wanted to give a name to our dolphin which by then had become loved by millions. We organized a naming competition and got hundreds of suggestions. It was difficult to pick a name, so we went to one of the co-founders, Allan, and asked him to make the decision. He picked the Sakila name from all suggestions.

PostgreSQL has always been popular - a top 5 database for about a decade already and currently the #2 most-loved database (behind Redis) according to the latest StackOverflow survey.

It’s a favorite because it’s open-source, free to use, community-driven without being owned by a single company, standards-compliant, filled with useful features, and very extensible.

Recently it has gotten significantly better with features like full-text search, JSON columns, logical replication, upsert, and better scalability. This gets you close to, if not beyond, the performance of typical commercial databases while also allowing you to consolidate several database systems into one for less overhead and cost. The popular foreign-data-wrapper extension even lets you query external sources directly from within PostgreSQL if necessary.

In fact, the extensions themselves are so good that many companies have been built around Postgres itself like CitusDB, Timescale, PipelineDB and others. Even AWS Redshift is built on Postgres code.

Add all that together and you have a powerful data platform that’s hard to beat, especially for startups and smaller organizations that need a reliable choice without tons of effort or cost.

Prof. Michael Stonebraker’s first DB project at UC Berkeley was called Ingres, both as a reference to the artist and as a reference to how one accesses a database (ie, one “ingresses” into a database).

After Ingres finished up as a research project, there was new DB topics to research - as covered in The Design of Postgres - for a next-generational DBMS that implemented what was originally called “extended relational” features, which are now called Object-relational.

This new DB research project - and the DB engine it produced - was called Post-Ingres or just Postgres.

After the Postgres Project itself finished up in the early 1990s, some of Prof. Stonebraker’s grad students - Jolly Chen in particular - took the university source code and changed the Postgres query language - which was a QUEL-derived language in the university days - and replaced it with SQL, and the open-source project they created is now called PostgreSQL.

But a lot of people still just call it Postgres, as it’s easier to pronounce :)

One potential reason for PostgreSQL gradually taking over former MySQL users, which I don’t see mentioned yet in the other answers, is the fact that it’s promoting itself as “the only true free & open-source RDBMS”, in response to the take-over of MySQL by the Oracle company.

This is of course a bit exaggerated (since most of the MySQL code is still open source and free), but I can imagine that MySQL became somewhat less “interesting” for people searching for an open source solution. Moreover, there are two side effects of this take-over, which may explain this decreased confidence in MySQL: (1) the development (in terms of new features) of MySQL has considerably slowed down since Oracle became responsible (although it seems like MySQL 8.0 is catching up, but as of this writing it’s not GA yet …); and (2) the birth of MariaDB which is competing with MySQL for the “heritage” of the open source project “MySQL”. This forking seems to have made people hesitate (and therefore maybe have made let them consider PostgreSQL, who knows …)

Historically, the MySQL approach has always been pragmatic: implement what people need, also if the SQL standard does not yet describe it. PostgreSQL’s approach has always been: implement what the SQL standard prescribes, and nothing more than that. In terms of usefulness, for most “low-cost” users, in the early days, the MySQL approach was more attractive. Today (and actually since the more recent SQL standards like SQL:2008 and SQL:2011) standard compliance (and compatibility with other RDBMS) is becoming more important for users, and the standard now includes all useful features so PostgreSQL need not be “less functional” than MySQL, as it has been in the “early days”.

It's Postgres because M. Stonebraker decided it was. He had left Ingres technical direction and returned to his research work at Berkeley. He then called his new database project Postingres meaning he was trying making something enrichened by his Ingres experience. Progressively the “in" substring was wiped and the project became Postgres. By 1995 the project was handed to an Open Source group that called it Postgres 95 or Postgres 1995. The support of SQL language was poor in Postgres when they took it over and to show their commitment to fully support SQL in Postgres 95 they renamed it PostgreSQL.

Oh why, in my opinion, there is nothing quite “suddenly”.

PostgreSQL has been around for truly a very long time, at least since 1994 (dating back into the early 80s). It is a widely available Open Source RDBMS, in the same manner as MySQL.

A gain in popularity may have come from a number of reasons:

• features and performance as well as scalability make it a proper alternative for applications where traditionally Oracle DB was hard to replace
• its more recent features for Key-Value-Storage (JSON / JSONB column type) make it an alternative to NoSQL-databases
• PostgreSQL supports clustering / Master-Slave-Architecture, which make it well-suited for cloud-like environments

I am not really a PostgreSQL expert, but it is usually my first choice when selecting an RDBMS. That is mostly because it is quite easily set up and it very probably provides any feature I might require in the future.

"Postgres" is a common name for the Open Source Relational Database system more formally known as PostgreSQL. It harkens back to the Berkely POSTGRES project although differentiated from that project by the difference in letter casing.

These days, both "Postgres" and "PostgreSQL" are used fairly interchangeably, although advocacy proponents tend to prefer Postgres since it is easier to spell and pronounce (especially for non-US speakers), even though the official name of the project is PostgreSQL. This is true for products based around the software as well, for example a service like "Heroku Postgres" is referring to Heroku's PostgreSQL based service offering.

To find out more about "Postgres" (aka PostgreSQL) software and/or project, check out the wikipedia entry or the PostgreSQL project page.

It is a database and what is a database all about? At its basic level, we use databases to store information. We take some amount of data from some source and put it inside a database to persist it in either memory or hard disk and eventually retrieve that data at some future point in time.

Thats what PostgreSQL is and we can connect to PostgreSQL using a client which is any piece of software like an API server, a utility program designed to connect to a PostgreSQL database and investigate some of the data inside of it.

When that client is connected to PostgreSQL you write some SQL which is kind of like a programming language of sorts. It tells the database some information we want to put inside of it, retrieve, update or delete, so its important to know how to write SQL at its basic level.

SQL is not just a communication language for PostgreSQL but its supported by many other databases as well such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB.

What may differ between the above databases and PostgreSQL is:

• writing efficient queries to retrieve information
• designing the schema, or structure of the database
• understanding when to use advanced features
• managing the database in a production environment

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL:2008 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, andexceptional documentation.

An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate.

PostgreSQL: About