The database that refused to die: How Postgres survived its own creators

A database system abandoned by its own creator in the mid-1990s has quietly become the backbone of modern cloud computing. That's the story of PostgreSQL, which Michael Stonebraker, its creator and a Turing Award winner, recently called "the epitome of open source software, because it doesn't belong to anybody."

After Stonebraker walked away, a small band of volunteer programmers rescued the codebase, swapped in standard SQL, and spent the next three decades shepherding it forward. Today, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have each built their own database services on top of it. As Stonebraker put it, "the elephants have basically bet the ranch on Postgres."

Still, the project has gaps. File-level encryption, required by payment industry regulations, remains unimplemented. But longtime contributor Bruce Momjian frames that less as a failure and more as a philosophy: "While proprietary databases target the workloads of their largest customers, Postgres targets the workloads of general users."

For a project that nearly vanished, that's a remarkable place to stand.