You might be thinking of > In POSTGRES they are run as subprocesses managed by the POSTMASTER. A last aspect of our design concerns the operating system proces

You might be thinking of > In POSTGRES they are run as subprocesses managed by the POSTMASTER. A last aspect of our design concerns the operating system process structure. Currently, POSTGRES runs as one process for each active user. This was done as an expedient to get a system operational as quickly as possible. We plan on converting POSTGRES to use lightweight processes available in the operating systems we are using. These include PRESTO for the Sequent Symmetry and threads in Version 4 of Sun/OS. From: The implementation of POSTGRES - Michael Stonebraker, Lawrence A. Rowe and Michael Hirohama Hat tip to Thomas Munro. I think he pointed this quote out to me in the past.