November 2025 Recap: PostgreSQL on Azure
Hello Azure Community, November was an exciting month for PostgreSQL on Azure, packed with announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025. In this recap, we’ll walk you through the highlights from features recaps to deep-dive sessions so you can catch up on everything you might have missed. If you couldn’t join us live, here are some of the key sessions now available on demand: Modern data modern apps: Innovation with Microsoft Databases AI-assisted migration: The path to powerful performance on PostgreSQL Azure HorizonDB: Deep Dive into a New Enterprise-Scale PostgreSQL The blueprint for intelligent AI agents backed by PostgreSQL Nasdaq Boardvantage: AI-driven governance on PostgreSQL and Microsoft Foundry We also introduced major updates, including Azure HorizonDB preview with AI capabilities and new features for Azure Database for PostgreSQL that make migrations faster, deployments smarter, and performance more predictable. The blog is organized into the following sections: Azure HorizonDB (Preview) Azure Database for PostgreSQL feature announcements Azure HorizonDB: AI features & developer tools Photo Gallery from Ignite Azure HorizonDB (Preview) If it’s not obvious, the introduction of Azure HorizonDB is a big deal. This brand-new, fully managed PostgreSQL service is built for mission-critical workloads and modern AI applications, bringing cloud-native scale, ultra-low latency, and deep Azure integration in one powerful offering. Here are some of the features that we offer with Azure HorizonDB: Scale-out compute architecture supporting up to 3,072 vCores across primary and replica nodes. Auto-scaling shared storage that handles databases up to 128 TB, while achieving sub-millisecond multi-zone commit latencies. Breakthrough throughput up to 3× higher than open-source PostgreSQL for transactional workloads, powered by our storage innovations. Learn more about Azure HorizonDB in our detailed blog. Azure Database for PostgreSQL feature announcements We introduced a wave of new capabilities focusing on performance, analytics, security and AI-assisted migration for Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Among the key general availability announcements were PostgreSQL 18, Fabric mirroring, Elastic clusters, and support for Parquet in the azure_storage extension. We also unveiled several exciting preview features, including Intel and AMD v6-series SKUs, the pg_duckdb extension, and enhanced tooling for Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migrations. All these updates are captured in our blog post explore the full list and learn more. Azure HorizonDB: AI features & developer tools Azure HorizonDB isn’t just built for enterprise-scale workloads it’s also designed to power next-generation AI applications. At Ignite, we introduced advanced AI capabilities including DiskANN with Advanced Filtering, built-in AI model management, and Microsoft Foundry integration. DiskANN Advanced Filtering reduces query latency by up to 3×, depending on filter complexity. AI Model Management enables developers to set up semantic operators directly within the PostgreSQL environment, simplifying AI workflows. Microsoft Foundry Integration adds a PostgreSQL connector, allowing Foundry agents to interact with HorizonDB securely using natural language instead of SQL. General Availability of PostgreSQL extension for VS Code We announced the general availability of the PostgreSQL extension for VS Code, making development faster and more intuitive. The PostgreSQL extension for VS code has now over 300K downloads from the Visual Studio Marketplace! This extension makes it easier for developers to seamlessly interact with any PostgreSQL databases. To learn more about these AI features in Azure HorizonDB, check out our blog post. Photo Gallery from Microsoft Ignite Ignite 2025 brought a lot of great sessions, announcements, and hands-on demos. Here’s a quick photo recap of some key moments from technical deep dives to product launches to hearing real world impact from our amazing customer speakers. POSETTE CFP Now Open We are excited to announce that the Call for Proposals (CFP) for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is now open! We’re inviting speakers, practitioners, educators, and community contributors to share their knowledge through talks and demos. If you’re passionate about PostgreSQL, open-source innovation, or building resilient data systems, we’d love to see your submission. CFP Link: https://posetteconf.com/2026/cfp/Ultimate Guide to POSETTE: An Event for Postgres, 2026 edition
POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 is back for its 5th year: free, virtual, and unapologetically all about Postgres. No travel budget required and no jet lag involved. Just your laptop, a decent internet connection, and curiosity. This year the POSETTE 2026 schedule has 4 livestreams (16-18 June) with 44 talks at ~25 minutes each—covering everything from query performance and partitioning to Postgres 19 features, extensions, and use cases. Which is awesome but also a bit of work to figure out which talks are for you. Hence this ultimate guide post. Every talk will land on YouTube afterward (un-gated, of course) so if you miss anything you care about, you can watch it later. But if you can catch a livestream in June, do it. That’s when the “virtual hallway track” happens on Discord—where you can ask the POSETTE speakers questions and compare notes with other attendees. Meeting other attendees who have the same weird Postgres problems you do can be reassuring somehow. And yes, there will be swag. This guide is your cheat sheet: I’ve categorized and tagged all 44 talks so you don’t have to read 44 abstracts back-to-back. In this post you'll get: “By the numbers” summary Map of the 44 talks 2 Keynote sessions 23 Postgres core talks 11 Postgres ecosystem talks 8 Azure Database talks Why participate on the virtual hallway track on Discord A big thank you to our amazing speakers Join us for POSETTE 2026 & mark your calendars Official POSETTE 2026 Trailer “By the numbers” summary for POSETTE 2026 Here’s a quick snapshot of what you need to know about POSETTE this year: 3 days 16-18 June 2026 4 livestreams In Americas & EMEA time zones but of course you can watch from anywhere 44 talks All free, all virtual 2 invited keynotes Driving Postgres forward at Microsoft (Livestream 1), and Postgres 19 Hackers Panel: What’s In, What’s Out, & What’s Next (Livestream 2) 25 minutes Average length per talk ~1100 minutes Total minutes in POSETTE 2026 talks 50 speakers POSETTE 2026 speakers include PostgreSQL hackers and contributors, users, application developers, PG community members, Azure engineers, & Azure customers 6 keynote speakers Affan Dar & Charles Feddersen (Livestream 1); and Álvaro Herrera, Heikki Linnakangas, Melanie Plageman, & Thomas Munro (Livestream 2) 19 countries Speakers reside in 19 different countries 23 companies Speakers hail from 23 different companies 17.6% CFP acceptance rate 42 talks selected from 238 submisssions 75% general Postgres talks 33 talks are not cloud-specific at all, they’re about the Postgres technology & ecosystem 25% Azure-related talks 11 of 44 talks feature Azure Database for PostgreSQL or Azure HorizonDB 1 organizing company Organized by the Postgres team at Microsoft, in partnership with AMD 17 languages Published talk videos will have captions available in 17 languages, including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Chinese Simplified & Chinese Traditional Map of the 44 talks To help you quickly navigate all 44 talks, here’s a map of the high-level categories and detailed topics. : A map of the POSETTE 2026 talks—high-level categories and detailed tags to help you find what you care about 2 Keynote sessions Affan Dar and Charles Feddersen lead the PostgreSQL engineering and product teams at Microsoft, In this keynote, they’ll walk through how Microsoft is contributing to Postgres, both upstream in the open source project and in the cloud database service they build on top of it. Driving Postgres forward at Microsoft, by Affan Dar & Charles Feddersen (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure HorizonDB, VS Code, Dev tools, community, Postgres hacking, open source, PosetteConf, livestream-1) Want to understand how Postgres features get decided? This keynote panel with 4 PostgreSQL committers & hackers will peel back the curtain. You’ll hear what made it into Postgres 19, what didn’t (and why), and get a sneak peek into a few of the things in the oven for Postgres 20. Postgres 19 Hackers Panel: What’s In, What’s Out, & What’s Next, by Álvaro Herrera, Heikki Linnakangas, Melanie Plageman, & Thomas Munro (Postgres 19, Postgres hacking, panel, open source, collaboration, multithreading, livestream-2) 23 Postgres core talks Data Modeling JSON in PostgreSQL - evil data type or just needs to be tamed?, by Boriss Mejias (JSON, performance, data modeling, livestream-1) PostgreSQL Design Patterns, by Chris Ellis (data modeling, SQL, PG use cases, livestream-1) Graph Data Exploring property graphs with SQL/PGQ in PostgreSQL, by Ashutosh Bapat (SQL/PGQ, graph data, data modeling, Postgres 19, livestream-4) LISTEN/NOTIFY LISTEN Carefully: How NOTIFY Can Trip Up Your Database, by Jimmy Angelakos (LISTEN/NOTIFY, PG use cases, triggers, livestream-4) Performance Maintaining Large Tables in PostgreSQL, by Sarat Balijepalli (WAL, performance, scaling Postgres, vacuum, autovacuum, statistics, partitioning, monitoring, livestream-3) My Postgres partitioning cookbook, by Derk van Veen (partitioning, PG use cases, data modeling, performance, livestream-4) PostgreSQL 17 vs 18: Side‑by‑Side Performance Wins in Real‑World Queries, by Divya Bhargov (performance, PG use cases, livestream-3) Vacuuming Enhancements in PostgreSQL 18: Faster, Smarter, More Predictable, by Shashikant Shakya (vacuum, async IO, monitoring, performance, livestream-4) PG Internals Linux and PostgreSQL in the Multiverse of Connections, by Josef Machytka (Linux, PG internals, connection pooling, livestream-2) pg_stats: How Postgres Internal Stats Work, by Richard Yen (statistics, pg_stats, PG internals, query planner, livestream-2) Postgres isn’t slow, your storage is, by Sai Srirampur (storage, IO, performance, livestream-3) PostgreSQL queues done right with PgQ, by Alexander Kukushkin (queues, PG internals, extensions, livestream-2) random_page_cost in Postgres - why the default is 4.0 and should you lower it?, by Tomas Vondra (PG internals, IO, performance, livestream-1) The Wonderful World of WAL, by Bruce Momjian (WAL, PG internals, replication, livestream-3) What's new with constraints in Postgres 18, by Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek (constraints, data modeling, livestream-2) Postgres Hacking Fuzzing PostgreSQL, by Adam Wolk (PG internals, testing, Dev tools, libpq, security, livestream-1) Journey of developing a performance optimization feature in PostgreSQL, by Rahila Syed (Postgres hacking, PG internals, performance, WAL, replication, livestream-4) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to PostgreSQL Hacking: Don’t Panic, Just Start Small, by Xuneng Zhou (Postgres hacking, PG internals, community, livestream-2) Replication Past, Present, and Future: Logical Decoding and Replication in PostgreSQL, by Hari Kiran (replication, logical decoding, PG internals, livestream-4) Where Does My INSERT Go? A Logical Replication Story, by Hamid Akhtar (replication, PG internals, WAL, livestream-4) Security From Dev to Prod: Securing Postgres the Right Way, by Sakshi Nasha (security, roles, PG use cases, extensions, monitoring, livestream-4) From trust to Tokens: A Short History of PostgreSQL Authentication, by Murat Tuncer (authentication, security, livestream-2) PostgreSQL vs. SQL Server: Security Model Differences, by Taiob Ali (security, authentication, SQL Server, roles, livestream-1) 11 Postgres ecosystem talks Analytics pg_lake: Postgres as a lakehouse, by Marco Slot (pg_lake, extensions, OLAP, data warehouse, Iceberg, DuckDB, analytics, livestream-2) Apache AGE Querying & Visualizing Graphs in Postgres with Apache AGE, by Christian Miles (Apache AGE, graph data, data visualization, SQL/PGQ, Azure HorizonDB, livestream-1) Autotuning Building safety tooling for risk-free AI tuning of Postgres: Fast cars need fast brakes, by Mohsin Ejaz (autotuning, AI, performance, monitoring, livestream-2) Change Data Capture Building Event-Driven Systems with PostgreSQL Logical Replication and Drasi, by Diaa Radwan (Drasi, replication, WAL, CDC, livestream-3) Citus Move Less, Move Faster: Speeding Up Citus Cluster Scaling, by Muhammad Usama (Citus, extensions, performance, scaling Postgres, livestream-4) Dev Tools An MCP for your Postgres DB, by Pamela Fox (MCP, AI, Python, Dev tools, livestream-1) pgcov: Bringing Real Test Coverage to PostgreSQL Code, by Pavlo Golub (testing, Postgres hacking, Dev tools, extensions, CI/CD, livestream-3) PostgreSQL Tooling Across AI Editors and Agents, by Matt McFarland (Dev tools, VS Code, Cursor, AI, data visualization, Apache AGE, graph data, Azure, MCP, Copilot, livestream-1) Django PostgreSQL Generated Columns by Example, by Paolo Melchiorre (app dev, Django, generated columns, livestream-2) Kubernetes Quorum-Based Consistency for Cluster Changes with CloudNativePG Operator, by Jeremy Schneider & Leonardo Cecchi (CloudNativePG, Kubernetes, PG use cases, livestream-3) Performance Modelling Postgres Performance Degradation on Burstable Cloud Instances, by Chun Lin Goh (performance, burstable, compute, QA, livestream-4) 8 Azure Database for PostgreSQL & Azure HorizonDB talks AI-related talks From Queries to Agents: The Next Era of Data Retrieval on PostgreSQL, by Abe Omorogbe (AI, MCP, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, graph data, Apache AGE, Azure HorizonDB, livestream-3) Production RAG at Scale with Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Julia Schröder Langhaeuser & Paula Santamaría (Azure Database for PostgreSQL, AI, RAG, PG use cases, livestream-3) AMD Choose the Right Azure Infrastructure to Improve Postgres Performance by Over 60%, by Andrew Ruffin (AMD, performance, Azure, compute, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, livestream-1) Azure HorizonDB Why we built Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL, by Dingding Lu (Azure HorizonDB, scaling Postgres, livestream-3) Flexible Server pg_duckdb in Action: Accelerating Analytics on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Nitin Jadhav (DuckDB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, extensions, OLAP, analytics, performance, livestream-4) The Rise of PostgreSQL as the Everything Database, by Varun Dhawan (Postgres history, extensions, graph data, Apache AGE, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, DuckDB, Citus, livestream-3) What I’ve Learned Teaching Postgres to 200+ field engineers at Microsoft, by Paula Berenguel (training, Azure, Postgres skilling, livestream-1) Oracle to Postgres Migrating VLDBs from Oracle to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, by Adithya Kumaranchath (migration, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Oracle to Postgres, livestream-2) Why participate in the virtual hallway track on Discord If you’ve checked out the schedule and plan to watch some of the talks, you might still be wondering: why join live—and why bother with the virtual hallway track on Discord? Here’s how a few of last year’s attendees described the experience: “Very impressed by all the speakers and content I am absolutely shattered as there was so much great content in all the talks over the past 3 days but I have probably learnt more in these sessions than I could have in months of reading up.” “Want to let y’all know how much I got from this onine conference, the speakers were excellent, well-prepared and well-presented. The hosts were informative, engaging, & amusing. The discord hallway channel made me feel connected. I learned a lot and found some new inspiration. I’ll be back next year!” “I have no idea how I’m going to summarise all the interesting stuff for coworkers.” The common thread: the live, shared experience—being able to ask questions, compare notes, and learn alongside other people in real time. How to join the virtual hallway track Head to the #posetteconf channel on Discord (on the Microsoft Open Source Discord) That’s where speakers and attendees hang out during the livestreams—it’s where you can ask questions, share reactions, and just say hi Big thank you to our amazing speakers Every great event starts with great talks—and great talks start with great speakers. Want to learn more about the people behind these talks? Visit the POSETTE 2026 Speaker page Click a speaker’s bio to see their written interview (if available) If a speaker has been a guest on the Talking Postgres podcast in the past, then you’ll find a link to their episode there, too Join us for POSETTE 2026! Mark your calendars I hope you join us for POSETTE 2026. Consider yourself officially invited. As part of the talk selection team, I’m definitely biased—but I truly believe these speakers and talks are worth your time. I’ll be hosting Livestream 1 and you’ll find me in the #posetteconf Discord chat. I hope to see you there. And please: tell your Postgres friends, so they don’t miss out! 🗓️ Add the livestreams to your calendar Livestream 1: Tue 16 June, 8am–2pm PDT (UTC-7) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Livestream 2: Wed 17 June, 8am–2pm CEST (UTC+2) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Livestream 3: Wed 17 June, 8am–2pm PDT (UTC-7) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Livestream 4: Thu 18 June, 8am–2pm CEST (UTC+2) [ register for updates ] and/or [ add to calendar ] Watch last year’s POSETTE 2025 talks in advance: And if you want to get ready, you can watch talks from the POSETTE 2025 playlist on YouTube anytime, anywhere. Lots of solid, useful, and evergreen Postgres talks in there. “Official Trailer” for POSETTE 2026 is on YouTube To help more developers, community members, and Postgres users discover POSETTE 2026, our team created this short video trailer. Take a peek and share it with friends as an invitation of sorts. We’re trying to make sure that people don’t miss their opportunity to be part of the livestreams and ask questions on the discord during the conference (as well as watch the talks on YouTube after the event is over.) Watch and share the trailer: Official Trailer for POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 Acknowledgements & Gratitude I’ve already thanked the 50 amazing speakers above. In addition, thanks go to Silvano Coriani, Cornelia Biacsics, Aaron Wislang, and My Nguyen for reviewing parts of this post before publication. I also want to thank the team at AMD for their partnership and support of POSETTE this year! And of course, big thank you to the POSETTE 2026 organizing team and POSETTE talk selection team—without you, there would be no POSETTE! Figure 3: Visual invitation to join the virtual hallway track for POSETTE 2026 on the Microsoft Open Source Discord, so you can chat with the speakers & others in the Postgres community
