I wish he described more the problems of their insular approach to avoid SQL. It used something like postquel, nobody used. It only shined under a C/C++ API, but was not usable for users. Just for developers to map their objects to. An opinionated OO database, which didn't follow the standards. And there were much better OO - DB persistency mappings these days, like for Lisp. There you had to write no glue code. Postgres was a turkey.

But everything changed when someone added SQL. Soon it became the very best SQL standards implementation. That's when I picked it up again, and stayed with it.