Momjian expressed pride in the reach of PostgreSQL code, saying during its development it solved a lot of problems no other project has.

"I will Google for something and the first Google reply is my PostgreSQL posting - what, are we the only people that care about this? I many cases it's true - what we accept is so stringent we won't accept anything else. The PHP guys needed spinlock code and they took it from us. We ended up not getting a lot of help from people we thought we could get help from."

According to Momjian, a lot of open source projects can learn from PostgreSQL's stringent quality assurance because they don't get the luxury of putting out a bad release because there is zero tolerance for things that don't work.

"Look at Mozilla where they tried to make a platform that no one wanted and Firefox just wanted to make a browser," he said. "People are more confident with us than some of the commercial databases."

When asked about the future, Momjian said he thinks development is always going to look this way.

"It's like we don't know what we are doing but we are determined to get there," he said. "I've got so many patches and some are too hard and complex so we need to move forward. If you look at the hackers list it looks completely chaotic because we are in trouble, but a month from now it is going to look fine."

With some patches going to require three days to do, Momjian is confident the upcoming 8.3 release "should be" more powerful than 8.2 which did not have a lot of new functionality but feature completion.

"If you look beyond 8.3 that's when the wheels start to fall off the car," he said. "Even in 8.3 we will have the ability to delay the data to disk for buffered transactions. I put it on the list because Informix had it and we are now getting stuff I thought I would never get in really trend-setting ways."

While PostgreSQL runs on 16 and 32-way systems "really well" users are going to see it "rocket off" because there is so much activity happening "we can hardly keep up with it".

"In the early years it was about stopping PostgreSQL from crashing, then it was performance, and the third phase is enterprise features and a lot of things enterprises need to do," Momjian said. "So I would say we kind of ended the enterprise features phase of things we are doing. So if we look at 8.3 and forward what you have are revolutionary features that go beyond things you can't do with other databases."

Such revolutionary functionality is "completely beyond" what Momjian thought a database could do in terms of performance and transaction processing.

"If you look in the next five years, PostgreSQL will be a poster child for databases period," he said. "There is not really another database that's enhancing at the speed of PostgreSQL, so what that would look like is hard to say."