[jacques_chester]

I believe the database described is Greenplum[0], which was a fork of PostgreSQL at 8.3, I think. It handles truly enormous datasets.

There's been an ongoing multi-year project to merge Greenplum up to the mainline so that it's no longer a hard fork.

Disclosure: I work for VMware, which sponsors development and sells commercial offerings of Greenplum.

[0] https://greenplum.org/

[mulmen]

The article says Yahoo bought Mahat Technologies for their columnar version of Postgres. That sounds similar to Redshift or Greenplum but I think it is different. I can’t find a clear history of Greenplum’s origins or what happened to Mahat. Looks like Redshift came from ParAccel which was a separate project. From what I can find there were a lot of similar projects at the time.