01 - PostgreSQL Intro

In this module, we'll give you a high level perspective of PostgreSQL and PG Admin with a brief history behind it.

PostgreSQL History

PostgreSQL, also commonly called "Postgres", was originally created in 1986 at the University of California-Berkeley by a professor and some of his graduate students. Postgres was one of the first major attempts at creating a relational database system. Over the course of the next decade, it underwent several major updates and revisions within the university, and a version of it was eventually purchased by IBM in 2001. In 1996, however, some developers outside of the university jumped on the open-source project and began a complete re-write of the system, including replacing its native, proprietary language with SQL. This culminated in 2004 with PostgreSQL 6.0, the first version as we know it today. Still one of the most-widely used database systems in the world, it has continually been open-sourced and updated, now currently at version 10.3.

PG Admin

PG Admin was originally created as pgmanager in 1998, a Windows-based GUI tool to manage PostgreSQL databases. Several versions of the program later, PG Admin 4 was released in 2016. Written in C++, it focuses on cloud-based databases while also providing support for local and physical databases.

pgAdmin, now pgAdmin 4, is the most popular Open Source administration and development platform for PostgreSQL.