Distribute PostgreSQL 18 with Citus 14
The Citus 14.0 release is out and includes PostgreSQL 18 support! We know you've been waiting, and we've been hard at work adding features we believe will take your experience to the next level, focusing on bringing the Postgres 18 exciting improvements to you at distributed scale. The Citus database is an open-source extension of Postgres that brings the power of Postgres to any scale, from a single node to a distributed database cluster. Since Citus is an extension, using Citus means you're also using Postgres, giving you direct access to the Postgres features. And the latest of such features came with Postgres 18 release! PostgreSQL 18 is a substantial release: asynchronous I/O (AIO), skip-scan for multicolumn B-tree indexes, uuidv7(), virtual generated columns by default, OAuth authentication, RETURNING OLD/NEW, and temporal constraints. For those of you who are interested in upgrading to Postgres 18 and scaling these new features of Postgres: you can upgrade to Citus 14.0! Let's take a closer look at what's new in Citus 14.0. Postgres 18 support in Citus 14.0 Citus 14.0 introduces support for PostgreSQL 18. This means that just by enabling PG18 in Citus 14.0, all the query performance improvements directly reflect on the Citus distributed queries, and several optimizer improvements benefit queries in Citus out of the box! Among the many new features in PG 18, the following capabilities enabled in Citus 14.0 are especially noteworthy for Citus users. To learn more about how you can use Citus 14.0 + PostgreSQL 18, as well as currently unsupported features and future work, you can consult the Citus 14.0 Updates page, which gives you detailed release notes. PostgreSQL 18 highlights that benefit Citus clusters Because Citus is implemented as a Postgres extension, the following PG18 improvements benefit your distributed cluster automatically, no Citus-specific changes needed. Faster scans and maintenance via AIO Postgres 18 adds an asynchronous I/O subsystem that can improve sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and vacuuming—workloads that show up constantly in shard-heavy distributed clusters. This means your Citus cluster can benefit from faster table scans and more efficient maintenance operations without any code changes. You can control the I/O method via the new io_method GUC: -- Check the current I/O method SHOW io_method; Better index usage with skip-scan Postgres 18 expands when multicolumn B-tree indexes can be used via skip scan, helping common multi-tenant schemas where predicates don't always constrain the leading index column. This is particularly valuable for Citus users with multi-tenant applications where queries often filter by non-leading columns. -- Multi-tenant index: (tenant_id, created_at) -- PG18 skip-scan lets this query use the index even without tenant_id SELECT * FROM events WHERE created_at > now() - interval '1 day' ORDER BY created_at DESC LIMIT 100; uuidv7() for time-ordered UUIDs Time-ordered UUIDs can reduce index churn and improve locality; Postgres 18 adds uuidv7(). This is especially useful for distributed tables where you want predictable ordering and better index performance across shards. -- Use uuidv7() as a time-ordered primary key CREATE TABLE events ( id uuid DEFAULT uuidv7() PRIMARY KEY, tenant_id bigint, payload jsonb ); SELECT create_distributed_table('events', 'tenant_id'); OAuth authentication support Postgres 18 adds OAuth authentication, making it easier to plug database auth into modern SSO flows often a practical requirement in multi-node deployments. This simplifies authentication management across your Citus coordinator and worker nodes. What Citus 14 adds for PostgreSQL 18 compatibility While the highlights above work out of the box, PG18 also introduces new SQL syntax and behavior changes that require Citus-specific work parsing/deparsing, DDL propagation across coordinator + workers, and distributed execution correctness. Here's what we built to make these work end-to-end. JSON_TABLE() COLUMNS PG18 expands SQL/JSON JSON_TABLE() with a richer COLUMNS clause, making it easy to extract multiple fields from JSON documents in a single, typed table expression. Citus 14 ensures the syntax can be parsed/deparsed and executed consistently in distributed queries. CREATE TABLE pg18_json_test (id serial PRIMARY KEY, data JSON); SELECT jt.name, jt.age FROM pg18_json_test, JSON_TABLE( data, '$.user' COLUMNS ( age INT PATH '$.age', name TEXT PATH '$.name' ) ) AS jt WHERE jt.age BETWEEN 25 AND 35 ORDER BY jt.age, jt.name; Temporal constraints Postgres 18 adds temporal constraint syntax that Citus must propagate and preserve correctly: WITHOUT OVERLAPS for PRIMARY KEY / UNIQUE PERIOD for FOREIGN KEY CREATE TABLE temporal_rng ( id int4range, valid_at daterange, CONSTRAINT temporal_rng_pk PRIMARY KEY (id, valid_at WITHOUT OVERLAPS) ); SELECT create_distributed_table('temporal_rng', 'id'); CREATE FOREIGN TABLE ... LIKE Postgres 18 supports CREATE FOREIGN TABLE ... LIKE, letting you define a foreign table by copying the column layout (and optionally defaults/constraints/indexes) from an existing table. Citus 14 includes coverage so FDW workflows remain compatible in distributed environments. -- Copy column layout from an existing table CREATE FOREIGN TABLE my_ft (LIKE my_local_table EXCLUDING ALL) SERVER foreign_server OPTIONS (schema_name 'public', table_name 'my_local_table'); Generated columns (Virtual by Default) PostgreSQL 18 changes generated column behavior significantly: Virtual by default: Generated columns are now computed on read rather than stored, reducing write amplification Logical replication support: New publish_generated_columns publication option for replicating generated values CREATE TABLE events ( id bigint, payload jsonb, payload_hash text GENERATED ALWAYS AS (md5(payload::text)) VIRTUAL ); SELECT create_distributed_table('events', 'id'); VACUUM/ANALYZE ONLY semantics Postgres 18 introduces ONLY for VACUUM and ANALYZE so you can explicitly target only the parent of a partitioned/inheritance tree without automatically processing children. Citus 14 adapts distributed utility-command behavior so ONLY works as intended. -- Parent-only: do not recurse into partitions/children VACUUM (ANALYZE) ONLY metrics; ANALYZE ONLY metrics; Constraints: NOT ENFORCED + partitioned-table additions Postgres 18 expands constraint syntax in several ways that Citus must parse/deparse and propagate across coordinator + workers: CHECK constraints can be marked NOT ENFORCED FOREIGN KEY constraints can be marked NOT ENFORCED NOT VALID foreign keys on partitioned tables DROP CONSTRAINT ONLY on partitioned tables ALTER TABLE orders ADD CONSTRAINT orders_amount_positive CHECK (amount > 0) NOT ENFORCED; ALTER TABLE orders ADD CONSTRAINT orders_customer_fk FOREIGN KEY (customer_id) REFERENCES customers(id) NOT ENFORCED; DML: RETURNING OLD/NEW Postgres 18 lets RETURNING reference both the previous (old) and new (new) row values in INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE/MERGE. Citus 14 preserves these semantics in distributed execution. UPDATE t SET v = v + 1 WHERE id = 42 RETURNING old.v AS old_v, new.v AS new_v; COPY expansions PG18 adds two useful COPY improvements that Citus 14 supports in distributed queries: COPY ... REJECT_LIMIT: set a threshold for how many rows can be rejected before the COPY fails, useful for resilient bulk loading into sharded tables COPY table TO from materialized views: export data directly from materialized views -- Tolerate up to 10 bad rows during bulk load COPY my_distributed_table FROM '/data/import.csv' WITH (FORMAT csv, REJECT_LIMIT 10); MIN()/MAX() on arrays and composite types PG18 extends MIN() and MAX() aggregates to work on arrays and composite types. Citus 14 ensures these aggregates work correctly in distributed queries. CREATE TABLE sensor_data ( tenant_id bigint, readings int[] ); SELECT create_distributed_table('sensor_data', 'tenant_id'); -- Now works with array columns SELECT MIN(readings), MAX(readings) FROM sensor_data; Nondeterministic collations PG18 extends LIKE and text-position search functions to work with nondeterministic collations. Citus 14 verifies these work correctly across distributed queries. sslkeylogfile connection parameter PG18 adds the sslkeylogfile libpq connection parameter for dumping SSL key material, useful for debugging encrypted connections. Citus 14 allows configuring this via citus.node_conn_info so it works across inter-node connections. Planner fix: enable_self_join_elimination PG18 introduces the enable_self_join_elimination planner optimization. Citus 14 ensures this works correctly for joins between distributed and local tables, avoiding wrong results that could occur in early PG18 integration. Utility/Ops plumbing and observability Citus 14 adapts to PG18 interface/output changes that affect tooling and extension plumbing: New GUC file_copy_method for CREATE DATABASE ... STRATEGY=FILE_COPY EXPLAIN (WAL) adds a "WAL buffers full" field; Citus propagates it through distributed EXPLAIN output New extension macro PG_MODULE_MAGIC_EXT so extensions can report name/version metadata New libpq parameter sslkeylogfile support via citus.node_conn_info Diving deeper into Citus 14.0 and distributed Postgres To learn more about Citus 14.0, you can: Check out the 14.0 Updates page to get the detailed release notes. As of this release, Citus documentation is now hosted on Microsoft Learn. With Citus 14, elastic clusters will soon support PostgreSQL 18, now available in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. You can stay connected on the Citus Slack and visit the Citus open source GitHub repo to see recent developments as well. If there's something you'd like to see next in Citus, feel free to also open a feature request issue :)January 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
We just dropped the 𝗝𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗮𝗽 for Azure Database for PostgreSQL and this one’s all about developer velocity, resiliency, and production-ready upgrades. January 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL • PostgreSQL 18 support via Terraform (create + upgrade) • Premium SSD v2 (Preview) with HA, replicas, Geo-DR & MVU • Latest PostgreSQL minor version releases • Ansible module GA with latest REST API features • Zone-redundant HA now configurable via Azure CLI • SDKs GA (Go, Java, JS, .NET, Python) on stable APIs Read the full January 2026 recap here and see what’s new (and what’s coming) - January 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQLSupporting ChatGPT on PostgreSQL in Azure
Affan Dar, Vice President of Engineering, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Adam Prout, Partner Architect, PostgreSQL at Microsoft Panagiotis Antonopoulos, Distinguished Engineer, PostgreSQL at Microsoft The OpenAI engineering team recently published a blog post describing how they scaled their databases by 10x over the past year, to support 800 million monthly users. To do so, OpenAI relied on Azure Database for PostgreSQL to support important services like ChatGPT and the Developer API. Collaborating with a customer experiencing rapid user growth has been a remarkable journey. One key observation is that PostgreSQL works out of box for very large-scale points. As many in the public domain have noted, ChatGPT grew to 800M+ users before OpenAI started moving new and shardable workloads to Azure Cosmos DB. Nevertheless, supporting the growth of one of the largest Postgres deployments was a great learning experience for both of our teams. Our OpenAI friends did an incredible job at reacting fast and adjusting their systems to handle the growth. Similarly, the Postgres team at Azure worked to further tune the service to support the increasing OpenAI workload. The changes we made were not limited to OpenAI, hence all our Azure Database for PostgreSQL customers with demanding workloads have benefited. A few of the enhancements and the work that led to these are listed below. Changing the network congestion protocol to reduce replication lag Azure Database for PostgreSQL used the default CUBIC congestion control algorithm for replication traffic to replicas both within and outside the region. Leading up to one of the OpenAI launch events, we observed that several geo-distributed read replicas occasionally experienced replication lag. Replication from the primary server to the read replicas would typically operate without issues; however, at times, the replicas would unexpectedly begin falling behind the primary for reasons that were not immediately clear. This lag would not recover on its own and would grow to a point when, eventually, automation would restart the read replica. Once restarted, the read replica would once again catch up, only to repeat this cycle again within a day or less. After an extensive debugging effort, we traced the root cause to how the TCP congestion control algorithm handled a higher rate of packet drops. These drops were largely a result of high point-to-point traffic between the primary server and its replicas, compounded by the existing TCP window settings. Packet drops across regions are not unexpected; however, the default congestion control algorithm (CUBIC) treats packet loss as a sign of congestion and does an aggressive backoff. In comparison, the Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control algorithm is less sensitive to packet drops. Switching to BBR, adding SKU specific TCP window settings, and switching to fair queuing network discipline (which can control pacing of outgoing packets at hardware level) resolved this issue. We’ll also note that one of our seasoned PostgreSQL committers provided invaluable insights during this process, helping us pinpoint the issue more effectively. Scaling out with Read replicas PostgreSQL primaries, if configured properly, work amazingly well in supporting a large number of read replicas. In fact, as noted in the OpenAI engineering blog, a single primary has been able to power around 50+ replicas across multiple regions. However, going beyond this increases the chance of impacting the primary. For this reason, we added the cascading replica support to scale out reads even further. But this brings in a number of additional failure modes that need to be handled. The system must carefully orchestrate repairs around lagging and failing intermediary nodes, safely repointing replicas to new intermediary nodes while performing catch up or rewind in a mission critical setup. Furthermore, disaster recovery (DR) scenarios can require a fast rebuild of a replica and as data movement across regions is a costly and time-consuming operation, we developed the ability to create a geo replica from a snapshot of another replica in the same region. This feature avoids the traditional full data copy process, which may take hours or even days depending on the size of the data, by leveraging data for that cluster that already exists in that region. This feature will soon be available for all our customers as well. Scaling out Writes These improvements solved the read replica lag problems and read scale but did not help address the growing write scale for OpenAI. At some point, the balance tipped and it was obvious that the IOPs limits of a single PostgreSQL primary instance will not cut it anymore. As a result OpenAI decided to move new and shardable workloads to Azure Azure Cosmos DB, which is our default recommended NoSQL store for fully elastic workloads. However, some workloads, as noted in the OpenAI blog are much harder to shard. While OpenAI is using Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server, several of the write scaling requirements that came up have been baked into our new Azure HorizonDB offering, which entered private preview in November 2025. Some of the architectural innovations are described in the following sections. Azure HorizonDB scalability design To better support more demanding workloads, Azure HorizonDB introduces a new storage layer for Postgres that delivers significant performance and reliability enhancements: More efficient read scale out. Postgres read replicas no longer need to maintain their own copy of the data. They can read pages from the single copy maintained by the storage layer. Lower latency Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) writes and higher throughput page reads via two purpose-built storage services designed for WAL storage and Page storage. Durability and high availability responsibilities are shifted from the Postgres primary to the storage layer, allowing Postgres to dedicate more resources to executing transactions and queries. Postgres failovers are faster and more reliable. To understand how Azure HorizonDB delivers these capabilities, let’s look at its high‑level architecture as shown in Figure 1. It follows a log-centric storage model, where the PostgreSQL writeahead log (WAL) is the sole mechanism used to durably persist changes to storage. PostgreSQL compute nodes never write data pages to storage directly in Azure HorizonDB. Instead, pages and other on-disk structures are treated as derived state and are reconstructed and updated from WAL records by the data storage fleet. Azure HorizonDB storage uses two separate storage services for WAL and data pages. This separation allows each to be designed and optimized for the very different patterns of reads and writes PostgreSQL does against WAL files in contrast to data pages. The WAL server is optimized for very low latency writes to the tail of a sequential WAL stream and the Page server is designed for random reads and writes across potentially many terabytes of pages. These two separate services work together to enable Postgres to handle IO intensive OLTP workloads like OpenAI’s. The WAL server can durably write a transaction across 3 availability zones using a single network hop. The typical PostgreSQL replication setup with a hot standby (Figure 2) requires 4 hops to do the same work. Each hop is a component that can potentially fail or slow down and delay a commit. Azure HorizonDB page service can scale out page reads to many hundreds of thousands of IOPs for each Postgres instance. It does this by sharding the data in Postgres data files across a fleet of page servers. This spreads the reads across many high performance NVMe disks on each page server. 2 - WAL Writes in HorizonDB Another key design principle for Azure HorizonDB was to move durability and high availability related work off PostgreSQL compute allowing it to operate as a stateless compute engine for queries and transactions. This approach gives Postgres more CPU, disk and network to run your application’s business logic. Table 1 summarizes the different tasks that community PostgreSQL has to do, which Azure HorizonDB moves to its storage layer. Work like dirty page writing and checkpointing are no longer done by a Postgres primary. The work for sending WAL files to read replicas is also moved off the primary and into the storage layer – having many read replicas puts no load on the Postgres primary in Azure HorizonDB. Backups are handled by Azure Storage via snapshots, Postgres isn’t involved. Task Resource Savings Postgres Process Moved WAL sending to Postgres replicas Disk IO, Network IO Walsender WAL archiving to blob storage Disk IO, Network IO Archiver WAL filtering CPU, Network IO Shared Storage Specific (*) Dirty Page Writing Disk IO background writer Checkpointing Disk IO checkpointer PostgreSQL WAL recovery Disk IO, CPU startup recovering PostgreSQL read replica redo Disk IO, CPU startup recovering PostgreSQL read replica shared storage Disk IO background, checkpointer Backups Disk IO pg_dump, pg_basebackup, pg_backup_start, pg_backup_stop Full page writes Disk IO Backends doing WAL writing Hot standby feedback Vacuum accuracy walreceiver Table 1 - Summary of work that the Azure HorizonDB storage layer takes over from PostgreSQL The shared storage architecture of Azure HorizonDB is the fundamental building block for delivering exceptional read scalability and elasticity which are critical for many workloads. Users can spin up read replicas instantly without requiring any data copies. Page Servers are able to scale and serve requests from all replicas without any additional storage costs. Since WAL replication is entirely handled by the storage service, the primary’s performance is not impacted as the number of replicas changes. Each read replica can scale independently to serve different workloads, allowing for workload isolation. Finally, this architecture allows Azure HorizonDB to substantially improve the overall experience around high availability (HA). HA replicas can now be added without any data copying or storage costs. Since the data is shared between the replicas and continuously updated by Page Servers, secondary replicas only replay a portion of the WAL and can easily keep up with the primary, reducing failover times. The shared storage also guarantees that there is a single source of truth and the old primary never diverges after a failover. This prevents the need for expensive reconciliation, using pg_rewind, or other techniques and further improves availability. Azure HorizonDB was designed from the ground up with learnings from large scale customers, to meet the requirements of the most demanding workloads. The improved performance, scalability and availability of the Azure HorizonDB architecture make Azure a great destination for Postgres workloads.From Oracle to Azure: How Quadrant Technologies accelerates migrations
This blog was authored by Manikyam Thukkapuram, Director, Alliances & Engineering at Quadrant Technologies; and Thiwagar Bhalaji, Migration Engineer and DevOps Architect at Quadrant Technologies Over the past 20+ years, Quadrant Technologies has accelerated database modernization for hundreds of organizations. As momentum to the cloud continues to grow, a major focus for our business has been migrating on-premises Oracle databases to Azure. We’ve found that landing customers in Azure Database for PostgreSQL has been the best option both in terms of cost savings and efficiency. Azure Migrate is by far the best way to get them there. With Azure Migrate, we’re able to streamline migrations that traditionally took months, into weeks. As a Microsoft solutions partner, we help customers migrate to Azure and develop Azure-based solutions. We’re known as “the great modernization specialists” because many of our customers come to us with complex legacy footprints, outdated infrastructure, and monolithic applications that can be challenging to move to the cloud. But we excel at untangling these complex environments. And with our Q-Migrator tool, which is a wrapper around Azure Migrate, we’re able to automate and accelerate these kinds of migrations. Manual steps slowed down timelines In general, each migration we lead includes a discovery phase, a compatibility assessment, and the migration execution. In discovery, we identify every server, database, and application in a customer’s environment and map their interactions. Next, we assess each asset’s readiness for Azure and plan for optimal cloud configurations. Finally, we bring the plan to life, integrating applications, moving workloads, and validating performance. Before adopting Azure Migrate, each of these phases involved manual tasks for our team. During our discovery process we manually collected inventory and wrote custom scripts to track server relationships and database dependencies. Our engineers also had to dig through configuration files and use third-party assessment tools for aspects like VM utilization and Oracle schema. When we mapped compatibility, we worked from static data to predict cost estimates and sizing, as opposed to operating from real-time telemetry. By the time we reached the migration phase, fragmented tooling and inconsistent assessments made it difficult to maintain accuracy and efficiency. Hidden dependencies sometimes surfaced late in the process, causing unexpected rework and delays. Streamlining migrations with Azure Migrate To automate and streamline these manual tasks, we developed Q-Migrator, which is our in-house framework built around Azure Migrate. Now we can offer clients an efficient, agentless approach to discovery, assessment, and migration. As part of our on-premises database migration initiatives, we rely on Azure Migrate to seamlessly migrate a wide range of structured databases (including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Oracle) from on-premises environments to Azure IaaS and PaaS. For instance, for an on-premises PostgreSQL migration, we begin by setting up an Azure Migrate appliance in the client’s environment to automatically discover servers, databases, and applications. That generates a complete inventory and dependency map that identifies every relationship between servers and databases. From there, we run an assessment through Azure Migrate to check compatibility, identify blockers, and right-size target environments for Azure Database for PostgreSQL. By integrating Azure Database Migration Service (DMS), we can replicate data continuously until cutover, ensuring near-zero downtime. In addition, Azure DMS provides robust telemetry and analytics for deep visibility into every stage of the process. This unified and automated workflow not only replaces manual steps but also increases reliability and accelerates delivery. Teams benefit from a consolidated dashboard for planning, execution, and performance tracking, driving efficiency throughout the migration lifecycle. 75% faster deployment, 60% cost savings Since implementing Azure Migrate, which now facilitates discovery and assessment for on-premises PostgreSQL workloads, we’ve accelerated deployment by 75% compared to traditional migration methods. We’ve also reduced costs for our clients by up to 60 percent. Automated discovery alone reduces that phase by nearly 40%, and dependency mapping now takes a fraction of the effort. With the integrated dashboard in Azure Migrate we can also track progress across discovery, assessment, and migration in one place. This eliminates the need for multiple third-party tools. These efficiencies allow us to deliver complex migrations on tighter timelines without sacrificing quality or reliability. Rounding out the modernization journey with AKS As “the great modernization specialists,” we’re often asked which is the best database for landing Oracle workloads in the cloud. From our experience, Azure Database for PostgreSQL is ideal for enterprises seeking cost-efficient and secure PostgreSQL deployments. Its managed services reduce operational overhead while maintaining high availability, compliance, and scalability. Plus, seamless integration with Azure AI services allows us to innovate for clients and keep them ahead of the curve. We also recognize that database migration is only the first step for many clients—modernizing the application layer delivers even greater scalability, security, and manageability. When clients come to Quadrant for a broader modernization strategy, we often use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to containerize their applications and break monoliths into microservices. AKS delivers a cloud-native architecture alongside database modernization. This integration supports DevOps practices, simplifies deployments, and allows customers to take full advantage of elastic cloud infrastructure. More innovation to come Overall, Azure Migrate and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure SQL Database have redefined how we deliver database modernization, and our close collaboration with Microsoft has made it possible. By engaging early with Microsoft, we can validate migration architectures and gain insights into best practices for high-performance and secure cloud deployments. Access to Microsoft experts helps us fine-tune our designs, optimize performance, and resolve complex issues quickly. We’re also investing in AI-driven automation using Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models to analyze migration data, optimize queries, and predict performance outcomes. These innovations allow us to deliver more intelligent, adaptive solutions tailored to each customer’s unique environment.PostgreSQL for the enterprise: scale, secure, simplify
This week at Microsoft Ignite, along with unveiling the new Azure HorizonDB cloud native database service, we’re announcing multiple improvements to our fully managed open-source Azure Database for PostgreSQL service, delivering significant advances in performance, analytics, security, and AI-assisted migration. Let’s walk through nine of the top Azure Database for PostgreSQL features and improvements we’re announcing at Microsoft Ignite 2025. Feature Highlights New Intel and AMD v6-series SKUs (Preview) Scale to multiple nodes with Elastic Clusters (GA) PostgreSQL 18 (GA) Realtime analytics with Fabric Mirroring (GA) Analytical queries inside PostgreSQL with the pg_duckdb extension (Preview) Adding Parquet to the azure_storage extension (GA) Meet compliance requirements with the credcheck, anon & ip4r extensions (GA) Integrated identity with Entra token-refresh libraries for Python AI-Assisted Oracle to PostgreSQL Migration Tool (Preview) Performance and scale New Intel and AMD v6 series SKUs (Preview) You can run your most demanding Postgres workloads on new Intel and AMD v6 General Purpose and Memory Optimized hardware SKUs, now availble in preview These SKUs deliver massive scale for high-performance OLTP, analytics and complex queries, with improved price performance and higher memory ceilings. AMD Confidential Compute v6 SKUs are also in Public Preview, enabling enhanced security for sensitive workloads while leveraging AMD’s advanced hardware capabilities. Here’s what you need to know: Processors: Powered by 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (code-named Emerald Rapids) and AMD's fourth Generation EPYC™ 9004 processors Scale: VM size options scale up to 192 vCores and 1.8 TiB IO: Using the NVMe protocol for data disk access, IO is parallelized to the number of CPU cores and processed more efficiently, offering significant IO improvements Compute tier: Available in our General Purpose and Memory Optimized tiers. You can scale up to these new compute SKUs as needed with minimal downtime. Learn more: Here's a quick summary of the v6 SKUs we’re launching, with links to more information: Processor SKU Max vCores Max Mem Intel Ddsv6 192 768 GiB Edsv6 192 1.8 TiB AMD Dadsv6 96 384 GiB Eadsv6 96 672 GiB DCadsv6 96 386 GiB ECadsv6 96 672 GiB Scale to multiple nodes with Elastic clusters (GA) Elastic clusters are now generally available in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Built on Citus open-source technology, elastic clusters bring the horizontal scaling of a distributed database to the enterprise features of Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Elastic clusters enable horizontal scaling of databases running across multiple server nodes in a “shared nothing” architecture. This is ideal for workloads with high-throughput and storage-intensive demands such as multi-tenant SaaS and IoT-based workloads. Elastic clusters come with all the enterprise-level capabilities that organizations rely upon in Azure Database for PostgreSQL, including high availability, read replicas, private networking, integrated security and connection pooling. Built-in sharding support at both row and schema level enables you to distribute your data across a cluster of compute resources and run queries in parallel, dramatically increasing throughput and capacity. Learn more: Elastic clusters in Azure Database for PostgreSQL PostgreSQL 18 (GA) When PostgreSQL 18 was released in September, we made a preview available on Azure on the same day. Now we’re announcing that PostgreSQL 18 is generally available on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, with full Major Version Upgrade (MVU) support, marking our fastest-ever turnaround from open-source release to managed service general availability. This release reinforces our commitment to delivering the latest PostgreSQL community innovations to Azure customers, so you can adopt the latest features, performance improvements, and security enhancements on a fully managed, production-ready platform without delay. ^Note: MVU to PG18 is currently available in the NorthCentralUS and WestCentralUS regions, with additional regions being enabled over the next few weeks Now you can: Deploy PostgreSQL 18 in all public Azure regions. Perform in-place major version upgrades to PG18 with no endpoint or connection string changes. Use Microsoft Entra ID authentication for secure, centralized identity management in all PG versions. Enable Query Store and Index Tuning for built-in performance insights and automated optimization. Leverage the 90+ Postgres extensions supported by Azure Database for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL 18 also delivers major improvements under the hood, ranging from asynchronous I/O and enhanced vacuuming to improved indexing and partitioning, ensuring Azure continues to lead as the most performant, secure, and developer-friendly PostgreSQL managed service in the cloud. Learn more: PostgreSQL 18 open-source release announcement Supported versions of PostgreSQL in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Analytics Real-time analytics with Fabric Mirroring (GA) With Fabric mirroring in Azure Database for PostgreSQL, now generally available, you can run your Microsoft Fabric analytical workloads and capabilities on near-real-time replicated data, without impacting the performance of your production PostgreSQL databases, and at no extra cost. Mirroring in Fabric connects your operational and analytical platforms with continuous data replication from PostgreSQL to Fabric. Transactions are mirrored to Fabric in near real-time, enabling advanced analytics, machine learning, and reporting on live data sets without waiting for traditional batch ETL processes to complete. This approach eliminates the overhead of custom integrations or data pipelines. Production PostgreSQL servers can run mission-critical transactional workloads without being affected by surges in analytical queries and reporting. With our GA announcement Fabric mirroring is ready for production workloads, with secure networking (VNET integration and Private Endpoints supported), Entra ID authentication for centralized identity management, and support for high availability enabled servers, ensuring business continuity for mirroring sessions. Learn more: Mirroring Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server Adding Parquet support to the azure_storage extension (GA) In addition to mirroring data directly to Microsoft Fabric, there are many other scenarios that require moving operational data into data lakes for analytics or archival. The complexity of building and maintaining ETL pipelines can be expensive and time-consuming. Azure Database for PostgreSQL now natively supports Parquet via the azure_storage extension, enabling direct SQL-based read/write to Parquet files in Azure Storage. This makes it easy to import and export data in Postgres without external tools or scripts. Parquet is a popular columnar storage format often used in big data and analytics environments (like Spark and Azure Data Lake) because of its efficient compression and query performance for large datasets. Now you can use the azure_storage extension to can skip an entire step: just issue a SQL command to write to and query from a Parquet file in Azure Blob Storage. Learn more: Azure storage extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Analytical queries inside PostgreSQL with the pg_duckdb extension (Preview) DuckDB’s columnar engine excels at high performance scans, aggregations and joins over large tables, making it particularly well-suited for analytical queries. The pg_duckdb extension, now available in preview for Azure Database for PostgreSQL combines PostgreSQL’s transactional performance and reliability with DuckDB’s analytical speed for large datasets. Together pg_duckdb and PostgreSQL are an ideal combination for hybrid OLTP + OLAP environments where you need to run analytical queries directly in PostgreSQL without sacrificing performance., To see the pg_duckdb extension in action check out this demo video: https://aka.ms/pg_duckdb Learn more: pg_duckdb – PostgreSQL extension for DuckDB Security Meet compliance requirements with the credcheck, anon & ip4r extensions (GA) Operating in a regulated industry such as Finance, Healthcare and Government means negotiating compliance requirements like HIPAA and PCI-DSS, GDPR that include protection for personalized data and password complexity, expiration and reuse. This week the anon extension, previously in preview, is now generally available for Azure Database for PostgreSQL adding support for dynamic and static masking, anonymized exports, randomization and many other advanced masking techniques. We’ve also added GA support for the credcheck extension, which provides credential checks for usernames, and password complexity, including during user creation, password change and user renaming. This is particularly useful if your application is not using Entra ID and needs to rely on native PostgreSQL users and passwords. If you need to store and query IP ranges for scenarios like auditing, compliance, access control lists, intrusion detection and threat intelligence, another useful extension announced this week is the ip4r extension which provides a set of data types for IPv4 and IPv6 network addresses. Learn more: PostgreSQL Anonymizer credcheck – PostgreSQL username/password checks IP4R - IPv4/v6 and IPv4/v6 range index type for PostgreSQL The Azure team maintains an active pipeline of new PostgreSQL extensions to onboard and upgrade to Azure Database for PostgreSQL For example, another important extension upgraded this week is pg_squeeze which removes unused space from a table. The updated 1.9.1 version adds important stability improvements. Learn more: List of extensions and modules by name Integrated identity with Entra token-refresh libraries for Python In a modern cloud-connected enterprise, identity becomes the most important security perimeter. Azure Database for PostgreSQL is the only managed PostgreSQL service with full Entra integration, but coding applications to take care of Entra token refresh can be complex. This week we’re announcing a new Python library to simplify Entra token refresh. The library automatically refreshes authentication tokens before they expire, eliminating manual token handling and reducing connection failures. The new python_azure_pg_auth library provides seamless Azure Entra ID authentication and supports the latest psycopg and SQLAlchemy drivers with automatic token acquisition, validation, and refresh. Built-in connection pooling is available for both synchronous and asynchronous workloads. Designed for cross-platform use (Windows, Linux, macOS), the package features clean architecture and flexible installation options for different driver combinations. This is our first milestone in a roadmap to add token refresh for additional programming languages and frameworks. Learn more, with code samples to get started here: https://aka.ms/python-azure-pg-auth Migration AI-Assisted Oracle to PostgreSQL Migration Tool (Preview) Database migration is a challenging and time-consuming process, with multiple manual steps requiring schema and apps specific information. The growing popularity, maturity and low cost of PostgreSQL has led to a healthy demand for migration tooling to simplify these steps. The new AI-assisted Oracle Migration Tool preview announced this week greatly simplifies moving from Oracle databases to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Available in the VS Code PostgreSQL extension the new migration tool combines GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI, and custom Language Model Tools to convert Oracle schema, database code and client applications into PostgreSQL-compatible formats. Unlike traditional migration tools that rely on static rules, Azure’s approach leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and validates every change against a running Azure Database for PostgreSQL instance. This system not only translates syntax but also detects and fixes errors through iterative re-compilation, flagging any items that require human review. Application codebases like Spring Boot and other popular frameworks are refactored and converted. The system also understands context by querying the target Postgres instance for version and installed extensions. It can even invoke capabilities from other VS Code extensions to validate the converted code. The new AI-assisted workflow reduces risk, eliminates significant manual effort, and enables faster modernization while lowering costs. Learn more: https://aka.ms/pg-migration-tooling Be sure to follow the Microsoft Blog for PostgreSQL for regular updates from the Postgres on Azure team at Microsoft. We publish monthly recaps about new features in Azure Database for PostgreSQL, as well as an annual blog about what’s new in Postgres at Microsoft.PostgreSQL 18 is now GA on Azure Database for PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL 18 is now GA on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Excited to announce that Flexible Server now offers full general availability of #PostgreSQL18 - the fastest GA we’ve ever shipped after community release. This means: 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥𝘸𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵, 𝘪𝘯-𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘫𝘰𝘳-𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘶𝘱𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴 (𝘗𝘎11-𝘗𝘎17 → 𝘗𝘎18), 𝘔𝘪𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵 𝘌𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢 𝘐𝘋 𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, and 𝘘𝘶𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘐𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘹 𝘛𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨. Check out the full blog for a deep dive 👉https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/postgresql-18-now-ga-on-azure-postgres-flexible-server/4469802 #Microsoft #Azure #Cloud #Database #Postgres #PG18Azure PostgreSQL Lesson Learned #10: Why PITR Networking Rules Matter
Co‑authored with angesalsaa Symptoms Customer attempted to restore a server configured with public access into a private virtual network. Restore operation failed with an error indicating unsupported configuration. Root Cause Azure enforces strict networking rules during PITR to maintain security and consistency: Public access servers can only be restored to public access. Private access servers can be restored to the same virtual network or a different virtual network, but not to public access. Why This Happens Networking mode is tied to the original server configuration. Mixing public and private access during restore could expose sensitive data or break connectivity assumptions. Contributing Factors Customer assumed PITR could switch networking modes. No prior review of Azure documentation on restore limitations. Specific Conditions We Observed Source server: Private access with VNet integration. Target restore: Attempted to switch to public access. Operational Checks Before initiating PITR: Confirm the source server’s networking mode (Public vs Private). Review restore options in the Azure portal → Restore. Mitigation Goal: Align restore strategy with networking rules. If source is Public: Restore only to Public access. If source is Private: Restore to same or different VNet (within the same region). Post-Resolution Customer successfully restored to a different VNet after adjusting expectations. Prevention & Best Practices Document networking mode for all PostgreSQL servers. Train teams on PITR limitations before disaster recovery drills. Avoid assumptions always check official guidance. Why This Matters Ignoring these rules can delay recovery during critical incidents. Knowing the constraints upfront ensures faster restores and compliance with security policies. Key Takeaways Issue: PITR does not allow switching between Public and Private access. Fix: Restore within the same networking category as the source server. References Backup and Restore in Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible ServerAnnouncing 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
