Postgres pioneer promises to upend the database once more
What if we built the operating system on top of the database instead of the other way around? It sounds like an idea from an undergraduate student after one microdose too many, except it's not. It's a serious idea from someone who has already upended the computing industry and whose influence has spread into familiar products from Microsoft and Oracle.
Celebrating his 80th birthday this year, Michael Stonebraker continues with his work in database research, but his mark on the industry has been cemented with PostgreSQL, the open source relational database system which, for the first time, became the most popular choice of database among developers this year, according to the 2023 Stack Overflow survey. As well as a popular open source DBMS, vendors including the cloud hyperscalers, CockroachDB and YugabyteDB all offer database services with a PostgreSQL compatible front end.