June 2025 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Hello Azure Community, We have introduced a range of exciting new features and updates to Azure Database for PostgreSQL in June. From general availability of PG 17 to public preview of the SSD v2 storage tier for High Availability, there have been some significant feature announcements across multiple areas in the last month. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into each of these feature updates. Before that, let’s look at POSETTE 2025 highlights. POSETTE 2025 Highlights We hosted POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 in June! This year marked our 4th annual event featuring 45 speakers and a total of 42 talks. PostgreSQL developers, contributors, and community members came together to share insights on topics covering everything from AI-powered applications to deep dives into PostgreSQL internals. If you missed it, you can catch up by watching the POSETTE livestream sessions. If this conference sounds interesting to you and want to be part of it next year, don’t forget to subscribe to POSETTE news. Feature Highlights General Availability of PostgreSQL 17 with 'In-Place' upgrade support General Availability of Online Migration Migration service support for PostgreSQL 17 Public Preview of SSD v2 High Availability New Region: Indonesia Central VS Code Extension for PostgreSQL enhancements Enhanced role management Ansible collection released for latest REST API version General Availability of PostgreSQL 17 with 'In-Place' upgrade support PostgreSQL 17 is now generally available on Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server, bringing key community innovations to your workloads. You’ll see faster vacuum operations, richer JSON processing, smarter query planning (including better join ordering and parallel execution), dynamic logical replication controls, and enhanced security & audit-logging features—backed by Azure’s five-year support policy. You can easily upgrade to PostgreSQL 17 using the in-place major version upgrade feature available through the Azure portal and CLI, without changing server endpoints or reconfiguring applications. The process includes built-in validations and rollback safety to help ensure a smooth and reliable upgrade experience. For more details, read the PostgreSQL 17 release announcement blog. General Availability of Online Migration We're excited to announce that Online Migration is now generally available for the Migration service for Azure Database for PostgreSQL! Online migration minimizes downtime by keeping your source database operational during the migration process, with continuous data synchronization until cut over. This is particularly beneficial for mission-critical applications that require minimal downtime during migration. This milestone brings production-ready online migration capabilities supporting various source environments including on-premises PostgreSQL, Azure VMs, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and Google Cloud SQL. For detailed information about the capabilities and how to get started, visit our Migration service documentation. Migration service support for PostgreSQL 17 Building on our PostgreSQL 17 general availability announcement, the Migration service for Azure Database for PostgreSQL now fully supports PostgreSQL 17. This means you can seamlessly migrate your existing PostgreSQL instances from various source platforms to Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server running PostgreSQL 17. With this support, organizations can take advantage of the latest PostgreSQL 17 features and performance improvements while leveraging our online migration capabilities for minimal downtime transitions. The migration service maintains full compatibility with PostgreSQL 17's enhanced security features, improved query planning, and other community innovations. Public Preview of SSD v2 High Availability We’re excited to announce the public preview High availability (HA) support for the Premium SSD v2 storage tier in Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. This support allows you to enable Zone-Redundant HA using Premium SSD v2 during server deployments. In addition to high availability on SSDv2 you now get improved resiliency and 10 second failover times when using Premium SSD v2 with zone-redundant HA, helping customers build resilient, high-performance PostgreSQL applications with minimal overhead. This feature is particularly well-suited for mission-critical workloads, including those in financial services, real-time analytics, retail, and multi-tenant SaaS platforms. Key Benefits of Premium SSD v2: Flexible disk sizing: Scale from 32 GiB to 64 TiB in 1-GiB increments Fast failovers: Planned or unplanned failovers typically around 10 seconds Independent performance configuration: Achieve up to 80,000 IOPS and 1,200 Mbps throughput without resizing your disk. Baseline performance: Free throughput of 125 MB/s and 3,000 IOPS for disks up to 399 GiB, and 500 MB/s and 12,000 IOPS for disks 400 GiB and above at no additional cost. For more details, please refer to the Premium SSD v2 HA blog. New Region: Indonesia Central New region rollout! Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server is now available in Indonesia Central, giving customers in and around the region lower latency and data residency options. This continues our mission to bring Azure PostgreSQL closer to where you build and run your apps. For the full list of regions visit: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Regions. VS Code Extension for PostgreSQL enhancements The brand-new VS code extension for PostgreSQL launched in mid-May and has already garnered over 122K installs from the Visual Studio Marketplace! And the kickoff blog about this new IDE for PostgreSQL in VS Code has had over 150K views. This extension makes it easier for developers to seamlessly interact with PostgreSQL databases. We have been committed to make this experience better and have introduced several enhancements to improve reliability and compatibility updates. You can now have better control over service restarts and process terminations on supported operating systems. Additionally, we have added support for parsing additional connection-string formats in the “Create Connection” flow, making it more flexible and user-friendly. We also resolved Entra token-fetching failures for newly created accounts, ensuring a smoother onboarding experience. On the feature front, you can now leverage Entra Security Groups and guest accounts across multiple tenants when establishing new connections, streamlining permission management in complex Entra environments. Don’t forget to update to the latest version in the marketplace to take advantage of these enhancements and visit our GitHub repository to learn more about this month’s release. If you learn best by video, these 2 videos are a great way to learn more about this new VS Code extension: POSETTE 2025: Introducing Microsoft’s VS Code Extension for PostgreSQL Demo of using VS code extension for PostgreSQL Enhanced role management With the introduction of PostgreSQL 16, a strict role hierarchy structure has been implemented. As a result, GRANT statements that were functional in PostgreSQL 11-15 may no longer work in PostgreSQL 16. We have improved the administrative flexibility and addressed this limitation in Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server across all PostgreSQL versions. Members of ‘azure_pg_admin’ can now manage, and access objects owned by any role that is non-restricted, giving control and permission over user-defined roles. To learn more about this improvement, please refer to our documentation on roles. Ansible collection released for latest REST API version A new version of Ansible collection for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server is now released. Version 3.6.0 now includes the latest GA REST API features. This update introduces several enhancements, such as support for virtual endpoints, on-demand backups, system-assigned identity, storage auto-grow, and seamless switchover of read replicas to a new site (Read Replicas - Switchover), among many other improvements. To get started with using please visit flexible server Ansible collection link. Azure Postgres Learning Bytes 🎓 Using PostgreSQL VS code extension with agent mode The VS Code extension for PostgreSQL has been trending amongst the developer community. In this month's Learning Bytes section, we want to share how to enable the extension and use GitHub Copilot to create a database in Agent Mode, add dummy data, and visualize it using the Agent Mode and VS Code extension. Step 1: Download the VS code Extension for PostgreSQL Step 2: Check GitHub Copilot and Agent mode is enabled Go to File -> Preferences -> Settings (Ctrl + ,). Search and enable "chat.agent.enabled" and "pgsql copilot.enable". Reload VS Code to apply changes. Step 3: Connect to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Use the extension to enter instance details and establish a connection. Create and view schemas under Databases -> Schemas. Step 4: Visualize and Populate Data Right-click the database to visualize schemas. Ask the agent to insert dummy data or run queries. Conclusion That's all for the June 2025 feature updates! We are dedicated to continuously improve Azure Database for PostgreSQL with every release. Stay updated with the latest updates to our features by following this link. Your feedback is important and helps us continue to improve. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or questions, we’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts here: aka.ms/pgfeedback We look forward to bringing you even more exciting updates throughout the year, stay tuned!New Generative AI Features in Azure Database for PostgreSQL
by: Maxim Lukiyanov, PhD, Principal PM Manager This week at Microsoft Build conference, we're excited to unveil a suite of new Generative AI capabilities in Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. These features unlock a new class of applications powered by an intelligent database layer, expanding the horizons of what application developers can achieve. In this post, we’ll give you a brief overview of these announcements. Data is the fuel of AI. Looking back, the intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be reframed as intelligence that emerged from the vast data they were trained on. The LLMs just happened to be this technological leap necessary to extract that knowledge, but the knowledge itself was hidden in the data all along. In modern AI applications, the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern applies this same principle to real-time data. RAG extracts relevant facts from data on the fly to augment an LLM’s knowledge. At Microsoft, we believe this principle will continue to transform technology. Every bit of data will be squeezed dry of every bit of knowledge it holds. And there’s no better place to find the most critical and up-to-date data than in databases. Today, we're excited to announce the next steps on our journey to make databases smarter – so they can help you capture the full potential of your data. Fast and accurate vector search with DiskANN First, we’re announcing the General Availability of DiskANN vector indexing in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Vector search is at the heart of the RAG pattern, and it continues to be a cornerstone technology for the new generation of AI Agents - giving it contextual awareness and access to fresh knowledge hidden in data. DiskANN brings years of state-of-the-art innovation in vector indexing from Microsoft Research directly to our customers. This release introduces supports for vectors up to 16,000 dimensions — far surpassing the 2,000-dimension limit of the standard pgvector extension in PostgreSQL. This enables the development of highly accurate applications using high-dimensional embeddings. We’ve also accelerated index creation with enhanced memory management, parallel index building, and other optimizations – delivering up to 3x faster index builds while reducing disk I/O. Additionally, we're excited to announce the Public Preview of Product Quantization – a cutting-edge vector compression technique that delivers exceptional compression while maintaining high accuracy. DiskANN Product Quantization enables efficient storage of large vector volumes, making it ideal for production workloads where both performance and cost matter. With Product Quantization enabled, DiskANN offers up to 10x faster performance and 4x cost savings compared to pgvector HNSW. You can learn more about DiskANN in a dedicated blog post. Semantic operators in the database Next, we’re announcing the Public Preview of Semantic Operators in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – bringing a new intelligence layer to relational algebra, integrated directly into the SQL query engine. While vector search is foundational to the Generative AI (GenAI) apps and agents, it only scratches the surface of what’s possible. Semantic relationships between elements of the enterprise data are not visible to the vector search. This knowledge exists within the data but is lost at the lowest level of the stack – vector search – and this loss propagates upward, limiting the agent’s ability to reason about the data. This is where new Semantic Operators come in. Semantic Operators leverage LLMs to add semantic understanding of operational data. Today, we’re introducing four operators: generate() – a versatile generation operator capable of ChatGPT-style responses. is_true() – a semantic filtering operator that evaluates filter conditions and joins in natural language. extract() – a knowledge extraction operator that extracts hidden semantic relationships and other knowledge from your data, bringing a new level of intelligence to your GenAI apps and agents. rank() - a highly accurate semantic ranking operator, offering two types of state-of-the-art re-ranking models: Cohere Rank-v3.5 or OpenAI gpt-4.1 models from Azure AI Foundry Model Catalog. You can learn more about Semantic Operators in a dedicated blog post. Graph database and GraphRAG knowledge graph support Finally, we’re announcing the General Availability of GraphRAG support and the General Availability of the Apache AGE extension in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Apache AGE extension on Azure Database for PostgreSQL offers a cost-effective, managed graph database service powered by PostgreSQL engine – and serves as the foundation for building GraphRAG applications. The semantic relationships in the data once extracted can be stored in various ways within the database. While relational tables with referential integrity can represent some relationships, this approach is suboptimal for knowledge graphs. Semantic relationships are dynamic; many aren’t known ahead of time and can’t be effectively modeled by a fixed schema. Graph databases provide a much more flexible structure, enabling knowledge graphs to be expressed naturally. Apache AGE supports openCypher, the emerging standard for querying graph data. OpenCypher offers an expressive, intuitive language well-suited for knowledge graph queries. We believe that combining semantic operators with graph support in Azure Database for PostgreSQL creates a compelling data platform for the next generation of AI agents — capable of effectively extracting, storing, and retrieving semantic relationships in your data. You can learn more about graph support in a separate blog post. Resources to help you get started We’re also happy to announce availability of the new resources and tools for application developers: Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging open protocol designed to integrate AI models with external data sources and services. We have integrated MCP server for Azure Database for PostgreSQL into the Azure MCP Server, making it easy to connect your agentic apps not only to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, but to other Azure services as well through one unified interface. To learn more, refer to this blog post. New Solution Accelerator which showcases all of the capabilities we have announced today working together in one solution solving real world problems of ecommerce retail reimagined for agentic era. New PostgreSQL extension for VSCode for application developers and database administrators alike, bringing new generation of query editing and Copilot experiences to the world of PostgreSQL. And read about New enterprise features making Azure Database for PostgreSQL faster and more secure in the accompanying post. Begin your journey Generative AI innovation continues its advancement, bringing new opportunities every month. We’re excited for what is to come and look forward to sharing this journey of discovery with our customers. With today’s announcements - DiskANN vector indexing, Semantic Operators, and GraphRAG - Azure Database for PostgreSQL is ready to help you explore new boundaries of what’s possible. We invite you to begin your Generative AI journey today by exploring our new Solution Accelerator.
