A quote from a very good online PostgreSQL book at
http://www.ca.postgresql.org/docs/aw_pgsql_book/node11.html
"University of California at Berkeley
POSTGRESQL's ancestor was Ingres, developed at the University of California at Berkeley (1977-1985). The Ingres code was later enhanced by Relational Technologies/Ingres Corporation, 6.1 which produced one of the first commercially successful relational database servers. Also at Berkeley, Michael Stonebraker led a team to develop an object-relational database server called Postgres (1986-1994). Illustra 6.2 took the Postgres code and developed it into a commercial product. Two Berkeley graduate students, Jolly Chen and Andrew Yu , subsequently added SQL capabilities to Postgres. The resulting project was called Postgres95 (1994-1995). The two later left Berkeley, but Chen continued maintaining Postgres95, which had an active mailing list.

Bruce Momjian
2002-01-08"

That quote is the sum total of my knowledge of the history of PostgreSQl.

What is says depends on what you believe the meaning of 'ancestor' to be. I interpret to mean 'derived from'.
JLK


>Ingres began as a project at UC Berkley to develop a RDBMS. It was then sold to Ingres Corp.
>
>Postgres began as a project at UC Berkley to develop an Object RDBMS after Ingres. PostreSQL is a merging of Postgres and SQL.
>
>Although some postings on the Internet claim that Postgres is based on Ingres, it is my understanding that Postgres was built from the ground up with new code.
>
>>PostgreSQL is, IMO, a better designed engine. Most features were designed in from the beginning and not added as an after thought. (Ingress came from an earlier version of PostgreSQL.) Several features that are really powerful is the ability to use more than one languge in UDFs, to inherit from other tables, and UDFs themselves. UDFs are not as powerful as Oracle's package paradigm, but the PostgreSQL UDF commands are, in many instances, indentical to Oracles.
>>Speed used to be a problem with PostgreSQL but it is not a problem now. Witht he latest release, 7.2, users can continue using PostgreSQL while the admin does a vacuum. In prior releases everyone had to quite PostgreSQL before the admin could do a vacuum. MySQL is good for medium to light stuff, but repeated experience has shown that it breaks down under heavy loads.
>>JLK
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>My biggest complaint about VFP has been the lack of security on the tables. Several of my users discovered that word and excel could get to the tables (normally I would have thought this was a good thing) and did not use release the connections correctly. This caused me major grief in many ways.
>>>
>>>John