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From: Álvaro Herrera <[email protected]>
To: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Cc: Dan Mahoney (Gushi) <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Quick questions about postgres name?
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:30:18 +0200
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>

On 2025-Sep-23, Tom Lane wrote:

> "Dan Mahoney (Gushi)" <[email protected]> writes:
> > It makes mention of the original professor who spearheaded the project 
> > under a DARPA grant, but it would probably do well to know where the name 
> > came from.
> 
> You should read Joe Hellerstein's recollections [1].  But tl;dr: the
> origin of the name is the old INGRES database system; Postgres was
> then named Post-inGres.

INGRES itself is an acronym, and reportedly it has nothing to do with
the French painter; quoth
https://ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au/~yuan/ingres/ingres.faq.html:

|   Trivium: INGRES is an acronym for INteractive Graphics REtrieval System
|   (revealing the nature of the project out of which the experiments with
|   relational databases arose).  By happy accident, there was also a
|   French artist by the same name: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
|   (1780-1867).  (A highly placed source who wishes to remain anonymous
|   confirms that the selection of the name WAS an accident.)



> There are also some references to PostQUEL referring to the ancient
> QUEL (QUEry Language) project [2].

The same documented cited above says:

|   01.005 Does OpenIngres support SQL?
    
|   OpenIngres supports SQL.  OpenIngres 1.x is compliant with the ANSI/ISO
|   Entry-Level SQL92 (SQL2) standard and also has some of the
|   Intermediate-Level features.  Embedded SQL and embedded Dynamic SQL are
|   also fully supported.  (See section 05.003 below for SQL2 references.)
    
|   Note that OpenIngres also supports QUEL and embedded QUEL, which it
    inherits from University Ingres.  Computer Associates de-emphasizes
    QUEL for obvious commercial reasons.  Because QUEL has considerable
|   technical advantages over SQL, OpenIngres adopted SQL relatively late
|   (c.  1986) and perhaps for this reason there is a lingering
|   misapprehension that OpenIngres still does not support SQL.
    
    University Ingres supports only QUEL and embedded QUEL.  (See 03.006
    for a description of `onyx' which provides an SQL to QUEL interface for
    University Ingres.)

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Puedes vivir sólo una vez, pero si lo haces bien, una vez es suficiente"

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