January 2026 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Hello Azure Community, We’re kicking off the year with important updates for Azure Database for PostgreSQL. From Premium SSD v2 features now available in public preview to REST API feature updates across developer tools, this blog highlights what’s new and what’s coming. Terraform Adds Support for PostgreSQL 18 – Generally Available Ansible module update - Generally Available Achieving Zonal Resiliency with Azure CLI - Generally Available SDKs Released : Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET and Python – Generally Available What’s New in Premium SSD v2 - Public Preview Latest PostgreSQL minor versions January 2026 Maintenance Release Notes Terraform Adds Support for PostgreSQL 18 Azure Database for PostgreSQL now provides support for PostgreSQL 18 which allows customers to create new servers with PostgreSQL 18 version and upgrade existing ones using Terraform. This update makes it easier to adopt PostgreSQL 18 on Azure while managing both provisioning and upgrades through consistent Terraform workflows. Learn more about using the new terraform resource Ansible Module Update A new Ansible module is now available with support for the latest GA REST API features, enabling customers to automate provisioning and management of Azure Database for PostgreSQL resources. This includes support for Elastic Clusters provisioning, deployment of PostgreSQL instances with PostgreSQL 18, and broader adoption of newly released Azure Database for PostgreSQL capabilities through Ansible. Learn more about using Ansible module with latest REST API features Achieve zonal resiliency with Azure CLI We have released updates to the Azure CLI that allow users to enable zone‑redundant high availability (HA) by default using a new --zonal-resiliency parameter. This parameter can be set to enabled or disabled. When --zonal-resiliency is enabled, the service provisions a standby server in a different availability zone than the primary, providing protection against zonal failures. If zonal capacity is not available in the selected region, you can use the --allow-same-zone flag to provision the standby in the same zone as the primary. Azure CLI commands: az postgres flexible-server update --resource-group <resource_group> --name <server> --zonal-resiliency enabled --allow-same-zone</server></resource_group> az postgres flexible-server update --resource-group <resource_group> --name <server> --zonal-resiliency Disabled</server></resource_group> az postgres flexible-server create --resource-group <resource_group> --name <server> --zonal-resiliency enabled --allow-same-zone</server></resource_group> Learn more about how to configure high availability on Azure Database for PostgreSQL. SDKs Released : Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET and Python We have released updated SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET, and Python, built on the latest GA REST API (2025‑08‑01). These SDKs enable developers to programmatically provision, configure, and manage Azure Database for PostgreSQL resources using stable, production‑ready APIs. It also adds the ability to set a default database name for Elastic Clusters, simplifying cluster provisioning workflows, support for PostgreSQL 18. To improve developer experience and reliability, operation IDs have been renamed for clearer navigation, and HTTP response codes have been corrected so automation scripts and retries behave as expected. Learn More about .NET SDK Learn more about Go SDK Learn more about Java SDK Learn more about Javascript SDK Learn more about Python SDK What’s New in Premium SSD v2: Public Preview Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server now supports a broader set of resiliency and lifecycle management capabilities on Premium SSD v2, enabling production‑grade PostgreSQL deployments with improved durability, availability, and operational flexibility. In this preview, customers can use High Availability (same‑zone and zone‑redundant), geo‑redundant backups, in‑region and geo read replicas, geo‑disaster recovery (Geo‑DR), and Major Version Upgrades on SSDv2‑backed servers, providing both zonal and regional resiliency options for mission‑critical PostgreSQL workloads. These capabilities help protect data across availability zones and regions, support compliance and disaster‑recovery requirements, and simplify database lifecycle operations. Premium SSD v2 enhances these resiliency workflows with higher and independently scalable IOPS and throughput, predictable low latency, and decoupled scaling of performance and capacity. Customers can provision and adjust storage performance without over‑allocating disk size, enabling more efficient capacity planning while sustaining high‑throughput, low‑latency workloads. When combined with zone‑resilient HA and cross‑region data protection, SSDv2 provides a consistent storage foundation for PostgreSQL upgrades, failover, backup, and recovery scenarios. These capabilities are being expanded incrementally across regions as the service progresses toward general availability For more details, see Premium SSDv2 Latest Postgres minor versions: 18.1, 17.7, 16.11, 15.15, 14.20, 13.23 Azure Database for PostgreSQL now supports the latest PostgreSQL minor versions: 18.1, 17.7, 16.11, 15.15, 14.20, and 13.23. These updates are applied automatically during planned maintenance windows, ensuring your databases stay up to date with critical security fixes and reliability improvements no manual action required. This release includes two security fixes and over 50 bug fixes across indexing, replication, partitioning, memory handling, and more. PostgreSQL 13.23 is the final community release for version 13, which has now reached end-of-life (EOL). Customers still using PostgreSQL 13 on Azure should review their upgrade options and refer to Azure’s Extended Support policy for more details. For details about the minor release, see PostgreSQL community announcement. January 2026 Maintenance Release Notes We’re excited to announce the January 2026 version of Azure Database for PostgreSQL maintenance updates. This new version delivers major engine updates, new extensions, Elastic clusters enhancements, performance improvements, and critical reliability fixes. This release introduces expands migration and Fabric mirroring support, and adds powerful analytics, security, and observability capabilities across the service. Customers also benefit from improved Query Store performance, new WAL metrics, enhanced networking flexibility, and multiple Elastic clusters enhancements. All new servers are automatically onboarded beginning January 20, 2026, with existing servers upgraded during their next scheduled maintenance. For a complete list of features, improvements, and resolved issues, see the full release notes here. Azure Postgres Learning Bytes Managing Replication Lag with Debezium Change Data Capture (CDC) enables real‑time integrations by streaming row‑level changes from OLTP systems like PostgreSQL into event streams, data lakes, caches, and microservices. In a typical CDC pipeline, Debezium captures changes from PostgreSQL and streams them into Kafka with minimal latency. However, during large bulk updates that affect millions of rows, replication lag can spike significantly, impacting replication lag. This learning byte walks through how to detect and mitigate replication lag in Azure Database for PostgreSQL when using Debezium. Detect Replication Lag: Start by identifying where lag is building up in the system. Monitor replication slots and lag: Use the following query to inspect active replication slots and measure how far behind they are relative to the current WAL position: SELECT slot_name, active_pid, confirmed_flush_lsn, restart_lsn, pg_current_wal_lsn(), pg_size_pretty( ( pg_current_wal_lsn() - confirmed_flush_lsn ) ) AS lsn_distance FROM pg_replication_slots; Check WAL sender backend status: Verify whether WAL sender processes are stalled due to decoding or I/O waits: SELECT pid, backend_type, application_name, wait_event FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE backend_type = 'walsender' ORDER BY backend_start; Inspect spill activity : High spill activity indicates memory pressure during logical decoding and may contribute to lag. Large values for spill_bytes or spill_count suggest the need to increase logical_decoding_work_mem, reduce transaction sizes, or tune Debezium connector throughput. SELECT slot_name, spill_txns, spill_count, pg_size_pretty(spill_bytes) AS spill_bytes, total_txns, pg_size_pretty(total_bytes) AS total_bytes, stats_reset FROM pg_stat_replication_slots; Fix Replication Lag: Database and infrastructure tuning Reduce unnecessary overhead and ensure compute, memory, and storage resources are appropriately scaled to handle peak workloads. Connector level tuning Adjust Debezium configuration to keep pace with PostgreSQL WAL generation and Kafka throughput. This includes tuning batch sizes, poll intervals, and throughput settings to balance latency and stability. To learn more about diagnosing and resolving CDC performance issues, read the full blog: Performance Tuning for CDC: Managing Replication Lag in Azure Database for PostgreSQL with DebeziumJune 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!
Azure Powershell DSC vs Ansible
Hey Guys, I just want to find out what are you using for Desired State Configuration on Azure. Do you use built in Powershell DSC or you are using Ansible with DSC enabled for Windows Machines? I am in the process of deciding which solution should the best for us. Also I would like to automate on-prem infrastructure. Which solution do you use? Regards, Wojciech
