On 2025-Sep-23, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Dan Mahoney (Gushi)" <postgres@gushi.org> 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"
