At the Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced Microsoft Azure HorizonDB, a new PostgreSQL cloud database in private preview. HorizonDB is a fully managed Postgres-compatible database service that supports scalable shared storage, elastic scale-out compute, and a tiered cache, which can be used for any type of cloud application.
Microsoft highlighted that Azure HorizonDB 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. In fact, Microsoft even claims that this new Azure HorizonDB can deliver up to 3x more throughput when compared with open-source Postgres for transactional workloads.
To make Azure HorizonDB enterprise-ready, Microsoft has integrated it with Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, Visual Studio Code, Entra ID, Private Endpoints, and data encryption. All the data stored in HorizonDB will be replicated across Azure availability zones by default. For added security, customers can also use the integrated Azure Defender for Cloud.
Postgres has become popular among modern AI startups because of its native vector index support. Microsoft is extending the vector index support in Postgres with two new capabilities.
HorizonDB has advanced filtering capabilities for the DiskANN vector index, which enable query predicate pushdowns directly into the vector similarity search. There is also a built-in AI model management to integrate generative, embedding, and reranking models from Azure AI Foundry.
In order to help enterprises migrating from Oracle to Postgres, Microsoft is releasing the preview of GitHub Copilot powered Oracle migration built into the PostgreSQL Extension for VS Code. This tool will help developers in automating the end-to-end conversion of complex database code using rich code editing, version control, text authoring, and more.
Azure HorizonDB is now available in Central US, West US3, UK South, and Australia East regions in private preview. Interested companies can apply for preview access here.