A Walking Tour of PostgreSQL
summary
Postgres traces back to the POSTGRES research project, becomes the SQL-based open source system from 1996, and evolves through concrete engineering: 400–500 regular contributors from 100+ employers, about 1.5M lines of C, and roughly 300 patches in flight. It reimplements parallel query execution twice, adds features like skip‑locks, supports extensions such as pgvector and PostGIS, uses LLVM for JIT, and sees incremental wins (example patches showing ~10% sorting speedups) while coordination happens largely via mailing lists.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro to speaker & topic
- 0:40What is PostgreSQL
- 3:49Origin and context
- 8:54Open Source PostgreSQL
- 10:00Relational database time chart
- 12:15The modern PostgreSQL project
- 15:30How Thomas got involved with Postgres
- 17:39Many specializations within on project
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