Research and development funding

PostgreSQL was originally developed as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Further work was carried out by volunteers until the late 1990s. Then, the first professional developer became involved. Over time, more and more companies and research groups became involved, supporting many professional contributors. Further funding for research and development was provided by the NSF. The project also received funding from the EU FP7 Programme in the form of the 4CaaST project for cloud computing and the AXLE project for scalable data analytics. AXLE deserves a special mention because it was a three year project aimed at enhancing PostgreSQL's business intelligence capabilities, specifically for very large databases. The project covered security, privacy, integration with data mining, and visualization tools and interfaces for new hardware.

Further details are available at http://www.axleproject.eu.
Other funding for PostgreSQL development comes from users who directly sponsor features and companies selling products and services based around PostgreSQL.