Slonik

PostgreSQL's mascot came out of a thread on the pgsql-hackers mailing list, where a contributor posting as Yang suggested an elephant on the grounds that, as the Agatha Christie title has it, elephants can remember. For a database, that is about as on-brand as a metaphor gets. Slonik is Russian for little elephant, and the name embedded itself so thoroughly that when developer Jan Wieck built a replication system and asked how to say many elephants in Russian, he got back Slony, which is what he called it. The elephant has been redrawn a few times, but the blue silhouette on the official logo page is the one every fork, extension and conference badge borrows. PostgreSQL Europe now brings a human sized Slonik costume to conferences and sells the plush, so the database with the famously long memory has the merch table to match.