Why Microsoft contributes to Postgres: What I tell people

Last week at PGConf.EU in Valencia, I gave a talk about the Postgres work being done at Microsoft (slides here). Getting ready for that talk, I kept noticing how much has changed in the Postgres team at Microsoft in the last 8 years.

When I joined Microsoft through the Citus Data acquisition in early 2019, Microsoft contributed to Postgres in only one of the 9 ways it does today: our Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service. We weren't sponsoring Postgres community conferences. We weren't sharing our expertise via blog posts and conference talks. We didn't have a Postgres open source contributors team. We didn't have a monthly podcast. And POSETTE: An Event for Postgres didn’t exist yet.

It's heartwarming to see how far we've come.

But sometimes, when I'm meeting people new to open source—especially those with a more proprietary software background—they will ask: “Why does Microsoft contribute to the Postgres open source project?”

And when they learn my job is to lead our Postgres community efforts, they'll ask: “How do you know your open source work drives revenue?”

Here's what I tell people about why Microsoft contributes to Postgres.

Contributing upstream makes Postgres better for everyone, including Azure customers

In my PGConf.EU 2026 talk, I used a slide like the one below to show how upstream and downstream fit together. Open source people use the “upstream” and “downstream” terms all the time, but they're not obvious to everyone. Quick definition: the upstream project is the Postgres open source project itself. Downstream services, like Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure HorizonDB, are built on top of it.

Figure 1: Slide from my talk at PGConf.EU 2026, depicting the upstream Postgres open source project and our downstream managed services on Azure.

If you run a Postgres managed service, you depend on Postgres—and we believe that means you have a responsibility to give back. So since 2019, we’ve been building a Postgres open source contributors team, to do our part to keep Postgres healthy for the long haul.

And our upstream work benefits everyone who uses Postgres, including our downstream Azure customers.

What might not be obvious: the things we learn running a Postgres service on Azure help the Postgres project too. When our engineers find a bug in Postgres while running it on Azure, they fix it upstream, which benefits Postgres users everywhere.

Even open source developers need to eat

Back in 2023 I wrote a meaty treatise of a blog post (complete with a hand-drawn infographic) about all the Postgres work happening at Microsoft. In that post, I included a section on why Microsoft has been building a team of Postgres contributors whose main focus is the upstream project.

My answer to “why” hasn’t changed—I’ve included it in every edition of the annual what’s new blog post since, including the 2026 edition of What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft:

In order to thrive, an open source ecosystem needs commercial support as well as volunteer efforts. Even open source developers need to eat! For the Postgres open source ecosystem to flourish, companies like Microsoft need to support the project by funding development in the Postgres core. Which we do.

PostgreSQL is a complex piece of software that runs mission-critical workloads across the globe. To provide the best possible experience on Azure, it follows that we need to thoroughly understand how it works. By having PostgreSQL committers and contributors on our team, they can share knowledge internally across different orgs, or directly answer internal questions regarding incidents or extension development.

Because today's cloud operates at a scale most on-prem solutions never encountered, unique cloud data center problems, often relating to performance, now require special attention. Our in-house team of deep Postgres experts are focused on tackling these cloud-scale issues upstream, in the Postgres core. Another benefit: our team's Postgres expertise gives Azure customers confidence in our cloud database services, too.

Commercial funding of PostgreSQL developers has another benefit: it gives developers the long-term stability to pursue the big things, the groundbreaking changes that are super important to the future. In particular, the Postgres contributor team at Microsoft is focused on some big architectural changes (example: Asynchronous IO) that you wouldn’t be able to do without the funding for a full-time, multi-year effort.

 

Example: one of those groundbreaking Postgres changes I mentioned landed last year: Asynchronous IO shipped in Postgres 18 and continues to evolve in Postgres 19 on forward.

If I were writing those 2023 words above fresh today, I’d add one more reason:

The Postgres project is about more than code. The project also runs on docs, the build farm, web infrastructure, packaging, translations, mentoring, conferences, trademark protection, the extension ecosystem, meetups, and more. That’s why our Postgres team contributes to the project in all sorts of ways beyond code.

Nine ways Microsoft contributes to Postgres

When explaining to people why we have a team dedicated to the upstream Postgres project, it helps to see how we contribute to the broader Postgres ecosystem—both our work on the Postgres code and community, and our managed services on Azure. So let’s walk through nine of the ways our team is contributing today.

Figure 2: Infographic of 9 of the ways our team at Microsoft is contributing to the Postgres ecosystem.

Clockwise, starting with our code contributions:

• Upstream Contributions to Postgres: Microsoft employs a dedicated team of Postgres committers and contributors working directly on upstream Postgres—plus a team working on open-source extensions such as Citus.
  
  While many of us believe commits are not a perfect measure of impact, they are a metric we have and they do give you a feel for scope. In the first release candidate of Postgres 19 (RC1), Microsoft’s team contributed 15% of the author commits (631 out of 4,098) and 17% of patch reviews (1,232 out of 7,240). The Microsoft team’s work spans performance, query planner, Async IO, security, and more. (Postgres 19 release notes)
  
  
• Supporting Postgres Events: Microsoft sponsors, and helps to organize, PostgreSQL community conferences and user groups worldwide. In the last year we sponsored 16 Postgres conferences, including PGConf.EU, PGConf.dev, PGConf India, and Postgres Summit US.
  
  Our team also shows up as speakers and program committee members. And several people on our team volunteer their time to co-organize conferences too: Daniel Gustafsson with Nordic PGDay; Melanie Plageman with PGConf.dev; Tomas Vondra with Prague PostgreSQL Developers Day (P2D2); and Cornelia Biacsics with PostgreSQL Conference Germany.
  
  
• Benefactor Sponsor of PGCA & the PostgreSQL project: Earlier this year, Microsoft made a benefactor donation to the PostgreSQL Community Association (PGCA), a non-profit chartered by the PostgreSQL core team in 2011 to protect and defend the Postgres trademarks.
  
  Full disclosure: I wear two hats here: I serve on the PGCA Board of Directors, and I work at Microsoft. With my PGCA hat on, I’m so appreciative of Microsoft’s support for the PGCA mission. (PGCA Sponsors)
  
  
• Visual Studio Code Extension for PostgreSQL: Lets you work with Postgres right inside VS Code. Over 785K installs, and it works with any Postgres database, not just Azure. (aka.ms/pgsql-vscode)
  
  
• POSETTE: An Event for Postgres: Free and virtual developer event with expert speakers from the Postgres ecosystem, now in its 6^th year. POSETTE 2027 will happen on 30 and 31 March 2027. (PosetteConf.com/2027)
  
  
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL: Our fully-managed database as a service, supporting the latest releases of Postgres open source.
  
  One thing I’m particularly happy to see: we supported Postgres 17 within 3 days of its release, and Postgres 18 on release day. With Postgres 19, we expect to support it on release day for both new servers and Major Version Upgrade. (aka.ms/azure-postgres-docs)
  
  
• Azure HorizonDB: Currently in preview, Azure HorizonDB is a new PostgreSQL-compatible database service built on a shared storage architecture, for applications that need to scale. (aka.ms/azure-horizondb-docs)
  
  
• Microsoft Blog for PostgreSQL: Our blog about Postgres, Azure, and our Postgres community initiatives. (aka.ms/microsoft-blog-postgres)
  
  
• Talking Postgres podcast: A monthly podcast about the people who work on Postgres and why they do what they do. I have the privilege of hosting it, and it’s so much fun. 44 episodes to date. (TalkingPostgres.com)

And there’s more! Beyond the nine, our team keeps releasing new open-source tools for the Postgres community. Two recent ones:

• pghacker-mcp: This open-source MCP server lets you get answers to questions about Postgres’s design history and source code, with citations. Ask why a feature works the way it does, and an agent finds the relevant pgsql-hackers mailing list threads, commits, and code that answer it, and quotes them. (pghacker-mcp.dev)
  
  
• pg_durable: An open-source Postgres extension that lets you write long-running, fault-tolerant SQL functions, with retries and scheduling built in. It’s handy for things like ETL, database maintenance, and AI apps. Our team uses pg_durable in AI pipelines, Oracle to Postgres migrations, and pg_textsearch. (aka.ms/pg_durable)

The revenue impact of upstream work is indirect—but it’s real

Which brings me back to the question new hires ask me the most, especially if they come from a proprietary software background:

Question: “How do we know our work on the upstream Postgres project moves the needle on Azure revenue?”

My answer: The revenue impact of our open source work is indirect. And while it can't easily be measured, it's real. That's true of the patches our engineers write, and it's true of the podcast, POSETTE, and the conferences we sponsor. You can't trace most commits to a dollar of revenue, any more than you can trace a conference talk to one.

Here's the thing: Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure HorizonDB are built on Postgres. As the Postgres project continues to thrive and grow, so do our Azure services.

It all starts with people

When we help make Postgres better, everyone who uses Postgres benefits, including our Azure customers.

On the Talking Postgres podcast we sometimes talk about the toothbrush test: when you brush your teeth in the morning, are you looking forward to the work you'll be doing that day?

My work leading our Postgres community efforts at Microsoft definitely passes the toothbrush test. 😊 And the biggest reason is the people.

In my talk at PGConf.EU I said that Microsoft’s investment in the Postgres project starts with people. And the inspiration for my Postgres community work also starts with people: the people in the broader Postgres open source community, and my Postgres teammates at Microsoft.

Figure 3: Slide from my talk at PGConf.EU 2026 about Microsoft’s work with Postgres, with headshots of the people contributing to the upstream Postgres open source project—who inspire me every day.

About Microsoft's Perspectives on PostgreSQL

Perspectives on PostgreSQL is a monthly blog series featuring insights from Microsoft engineers, contributors, and builders working with PostgreSQL. Explore more articles on the Microsoft for PostgreSQL blog.