Announcing Azure HorizonDB

Affan Dar, Vice President of Engineering, PostgreSQL at Microsoft
Charles Feddersen, Partner Director of Program Management, PostgreSQL at Microsoft

Today at Microsoft Ignite, we’re excited to unveil the preview of Azure HorizonDB, a fully managed Postgres-compatible database service designed to meet the needs of modern enterprise workloads. The cloud native architecture of Azure HorizonDB delivers highly scalable shared storage, elastic scale-out compute, and a tiered cache optimized for running cloud applications of any scale.

Postgres is transforming industries worldwide and is emerging as the foundation of modern data solutions across all sectors at an unprecedented pace. For developers, it is the database of choice for building new applications with its rich set of extensions, open-source API, and expansive ecosystems of tools and libraries. At the same time, but at the opposite end of the workload spectrum, enterprises around the world are also increasingly turning to Postgres to modernize their existing applications.

Azure HorizonDB is designed to support applications across the entire workload spectrum from the first line of code in a new app to the migration of large-scale, mission-critical solutions. Developers benefit from the robust Postgres ecosystem and seamless integration with Azure’s advanced AI capabilities, while enterprises can gain a secure, highly available, and performant cloud database to host their business applications. Whether you’re building from scratch or transforming legacy infrastructure, Azure HorizonDB empowers you to innovate and scale with confidence, today and into the future.

Azure HorizonDB introduces new levels of performance and scalability to PostgreSQL. The scale-out compute architecture supports up to 3,072 vCores across primary and replica nodes, and the auto-scaling shared storage supports up to 128TB databases while providing sub-millisecond multi-zone commit latencies. This storage innovation enables Azure HorizonDB to deliver up to 3x more throughput when compared with open-source Postgres for transactional workloads.

Azure HorizonDB is enterprise ready on day one. With native support for Entra ID, Private Endpoints, and data encryption, it provides compliance and security for sensitive data stored in the cloud. All data is replicated across availability zones by default and maintenance operations are transparent with near-zero downtime. Backups are fully automated, and integration with Azure Defender for Cloud provides additional protection for highly sensitive data. All up, Azure HorizonDB offers enterprise-grade security, compliance, and reliability, making it ready for business use today.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been an explosion of new AI apps being built, and Postgres has become the database of choice due in large part to its vector index support. Azure HorizonDB extends the AI capabilities of Postgres further with two key features.  We are introducing advanced filtering capabilities to the DiskANN vector index which enable query predicate pushdowns directly into the vector similarity search. This provides significant performance and scalability improvements over pgvector HNSW while maintaining accuracy and is ideal for similarity search over transactional data in Postgres. The second feature is built-in AI model management that seamlessly integrates generative, embedding, and reranking models from Microsoft Foundry for developers to use in the database with zero configuration.

In addition to enhanced vector indexing and simplified model management to build powerful new AI apps, we’re also pleased to announce the general availability of Microsoft’s PostgreSQL Extension for VS Code that provides the tooling for Postgres developers to maximize their productivity. Using this extension, GitHub Copilot is context aware of the Postgres database which means less prompting and higher quality answers, and in the Ignite release, we’ve added live monitoring with one-click GitHub Copilot debugging where Agent mode can launch directly from the performance monitoring dashboard to diagnose Postgres performance issues and guide users to a fix.

Alpha Life Sciences are an existing Azure customers

“I’m truly excited about how Azure HorizonDB empowers our AI development. Its seamless support for Vector DB, RAG, and Agentic AI allows us to build intelligent features directly on a reliable Postgres foundation. With Azure HorizonDB, I can focus on advancing AI capabilities instead of managing infrastructure complexities. It’s a smart, forward-looking solution that perfectly aligns with how we design and deliver AI-powered applications.” Pengcheng Xu, CTO Alpha Life Sciences

For enterprises that are modernizing their applications to Postgres in the cloud, the security and availability of Azure HorizonDB make it an ideal platform. However, these migrations are often complex and time consuming for large legacy codebase conversions. To simplify this and reduce the risk, we’re pleased to announce the preview of GitHub Copilot powered Oracle migration built into the PostgreSQL Extension for VS Code. Built into VS Code, teams of engineers can work with GitHub Copilot to automate the end-to-end conversion of complex database code using rich code editing, version control, text authoring, and deployment in an integrated development environment.

Azure HorizonDB is the next generation of fully managed, cloud native PostgreSQL database service. Built on the latest Azure infrastructure with state-of-the-art cloud architecture, Azure HorizonDB is ready to for the most demanding application workloads.

In addition to our portfolio of managed Postgres services in Azure, Microsoft is deeply invested into the open source Postgres project and is one of the top corporate upstream contributors and sponsors for the PostgreSQL project, with 19 Postgres project contributors employed by Microsoft. As a hyperscale Postgres vendor, it’s critical to actively participate in the open-source project. It enables us to better support our customers down to the metal in Azure, and to contribute our learnings from running Postgres at scale back to the community. We’re committed to continuing our investment to push the Postgres project forward, and the team is already active in making contributions to Postgres 19 to be released in 2026.

Ready to explore Azure HorizonDB?
Azure HorizonDB is initially available in Central US, West US3, UK South and Australia East regions. Customers are invited to apply for early preview access to Azure HorizonDB and get hands-on experience with this new service. Participation is limited, apply now at aka.ms/PreviewHorizonDB