A small bit of history from Tom Lane one of the biggest contributors to the project "Arguably,
the 1996 decision to call it PostgreSQL instead of reverting to
plain Postgres was the single worst mistake this project ever made."
That's what they said in 1996. Then they said it again in 2006. In 2026 when its interwoven in all sorts of AI systems and still causing confusion, they will be looking back thinking why didn't they fix it back in 2017 when they still could. "Now" is always the right time, it's never too late.
Neither works: psql is the bundled postgres shell and (pl/)pgsql is posgres's procedural SQL extension (inspired by Oracle/s pl/sql) so both are pretty ambiguous.
Slightly clunky names are fine as long as they're somewhat cute or clever. Names are important because it's how we identify and remember things, and a catchy name (even if it seems a little ridiculous or clunky) is better than a boring, banal name if the catchy name is memorable.
I'll take PostgreSQL's name (which I consider clever) any day over some name completely devoid of originality or thoughtfulness, such as most of the names Microsoft uses for its software.
Yes, at least it's searchable. The current trend of using common words as names was ridiculous as of a few years ago. Now it's just painful. Someone's going to name their project "The" and I'm not sure I'll be able to remain civil at that point.
Microsoft's naming (or lack of) is a mixed blessing.. usually combining "Microsoft" + term works... what sucks is when you search for anything "SQL" and you get a bunch of MS-SQL related links... really, T-SQL and MS-SQL should always be prefixed when referring to the vendor's product.
"He lives in Helsinki with his second wife Anna and daughter Maria (after whom MariaDB was named), and has a daughter My (after whom MySQL was named)[14] and a son Max (giving the name for MaxDB) from his first marriage"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius
A tip that works for some: lips to say "oooo" (like an owl, or someone seeing something shiny for the first time), tongue to say "eeee". Well, worth a try.
I think you will find [y] in most Germanic languages, including German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, (most likely) Icelandic, and Dutch, so probably not. But it is a very "Finnish" vowel though... Hyyvää!
Besides, Widenius is Swedish speaking (just like Linus Thorvalds and about 10% of the people of Finland) and the name "My" was more or less invented by the also Swedish speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson in her books about the Moomins.
Although wikipedia claims it to be a short form of Mary or Maria, which I seriously doubt.
Anyway, Finnish has not that much to do with the name, I think that it allegedly was Tove Janssons uncle - a professor in mathematics, that suggested the name based on the mathematical symbol and Greek letter μ pronounced in Swedish. It might even be vaguely similar to how it was pronounced in ancient Greek :-)
Besides, I think that "My" in Finnish would be spelled "Myy" since just about the only simple thing with the Finnish language is that the vowel length is indicated by the number of characters.
Oh, thanks! I was led astray by people earlier in the thread mentioning Finnish and so I simply assumed Monty's first language was Finnish, which, as you point out, it isn't.
Maybe Monty should upload an .au file somewhere saying "Hello, this is Monty Widenius, and I pronounce MySQL as MySQL"!
I don't speak Finnish. But I did once hear David Axmark pronounce My's name, and to my ear it sounded like "Mih" - an "M" followed by a short vowel similar to the vowel in "bit". In other words, My's name is the same as Mitt Romney's first name, just without the "t" at the end.
You might want IPA [ɪ]. (But another comment in this thread suggested [y], a sound that English doesn't have, and which is close in several ways to English [i] in "me" or [ɪ] in "bit".)
Except the name is a bit clunky and hard to write ;)