When PostgreSQL started, its uses were relatively niche, said Jonathan Katz of Amazon Web Services in this episode of The New Stack Makers.

Today, its uses are widespread across applications and workloads, said Katz, a principal product manager and technical lead at Amazon RDS and a core team member at Amazon Web Services on the Postgres project.

“Back when it started, it was it was fairly niche,” Katz said from the Open Source Summit in Europe about PostgreSQL, “You know, there were other relational database systems out there, both open source and commercial.”

Katz has spent more than half his life working on Postgres. His first involvement came by writing SQL and attending user groups and events. He worked on the website release management and helped organize events.

“When I first got involved in the project, I was an app developer, I just wrote SQL,” Katz said. “And I thought, like, ‘Oh, cool, people get involved in Postgres, because they write SQL.’” Well, people get involved in Postgres, because they love database internals. “There were just so many talented developers working on it. I felt I could be most helpful was working on the nondevelopment work. I had experience organizing events. I used to, well, well, in college, I organized startup events. And I tried to carry that over into the open source communities. I helped organize the local New York City user group, and ultimately we started organizing an annual event around that. And that’s where I started in the community. Because, you know, while a lot of the Postgres community operates on mailing lists, a lot of the brainstorming, and the connection building occurs at the events, there’s no substitute for that.”

Postgres emerged from academic research at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1980s, created initially by Micahel Stonebraker, a database researcher at Berkeley. In 1994, the project officially became PostgreSQL and was released as an ope