Interview with Microsoft

Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PGConf.DE 2025 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.

In which areas do you expect PostgreSQL to grow most and how does your company contribute to and benefit from that growth?

PostgreSQL is the most popular database for developers and its popularity will continue to grow. Combining a highly optimized query engine with tried and tested extension support, PostgreSQL is well-situated at the confluence of emerging technologies. The growth of AI, and the popularity of Postgres as a vector storage engine provides a compelling example of this trend. We leverage this extensibility with pgvector, contributing to performance improvements and reliability, and a new, faster indexing algorithm DiskANN developed by Microsoft Research, and compliment it with integration with Azure AI services, and the Apache AGE extension supported modern GraphRAG Gen AI applications. As Agentic AI applications and the surrounding ecosystems mature, there will be an increasing need for these applications to leverage robust production features such as data encryption, enterprise identity, high availability and disaster recovery. The features we've added to our Azure Database for PostgreSQL- Flexible Server service are designed with these requirements in mind, and we continue to invest in open-source PostgreSQL with performance, reliability, and observability improvements.

What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?

Our PostgreSQL centered product is Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server.  It offers a highly available, scalable, and fully managed cloud-hosted PostgreSQL service integrated with Azure's ecosystem for enriched and AI-enabled applications. Flexible server provides cost efficiency by leveraging Azure features like Reserved Capacity, Burstable Compute, and independent IOPS allocation. Key features include zone-redundant high availability, geo-redundant backup, advanced security with Azure Private Endpoints and data encryption, scalable performance features like elastic clusters, and integration with the Fabric analytics platform through Fabric mirroring. For customers who have widely deployed Microsoft Entra (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) as their identity platform, Flexible Server is the only managed Postgres service to provide integrated support for Entra authentication. Supporting the latest PostgreSQL versions and extensions, it ensures integrated access to advanced features including pgvector and Azure AI services. With a global presence (60+ Azure regions available), it ensures low latency and worldwide reach.

Which of your company's contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?

Microsoft’s PostgreSQL committers & contributors team continues to contribute many changes to PostgreSQL in the form of enhancements, bug fixes, build & developer experience improvements in collaboration with the vibrant PostgreSQL engine development community. During the PG18 development cycle, our team led the project to implement Asynchronous IO for critical read paths in PostgreSQL. We played a significant role in the design discussions and initial implementation of multithreading. Additionally, we contributed extensively to integrating OAuth support into the upstream codebase, enhancing the performance of partitioned tables, and improving various aspects of the query layer. Our efforts also focused on optimizing VACUUM operations through resource amortization and enhancements. We introduced observability features for memory usage, which greatly improved debuggability, and contributed to initiatives aimed at enhancing memory plasticity. Furthermore, we improved connection diagnostics and continued to support CI/CD maintenance processes.

Find out more about our team and their contributions in this blog post: Microsoft PostgreSQL OSS engine team: reflecting on 2024

Which PostgreSQL extension do you benefit from most, and why?

The Citus extension to Postgres benefits Microsoft the most. Elastic clusters on PostgreSQL Flexible server using the Citus extension enables horizontal scale out of a database beyond a single node using row or schema based sharding. With a shared nothing architecture, Citus gives you the ability to scale out throughput of multi-tenant applications adding nodes to the cluster as needed and has ability to also cross node queries by 20x to 300x (or more) through parallelism, keeping more data in cluster memory, and aggregating I/O bandwidth across all cluster nodes. With Elastic clusters you get all the managed service benefits in Azure including choices of compute and storage, cluster level HA, backups, metrics besides others. The Citus distribution can also be easily combined with native Postgres partitioning making it right for extra-large time series workloads. As an extension to Postgres, it’s easy to keep Citus in sync with the latest Postgres releases & stay current with all the latest innovations in its community. Citus is 100% open source, so anyone who doesn’t need a fully managed cloud service can gain the benefits of Citus too.

What makes you want to attend the PostgreSQL Conference Europe conference?

Community conferences are genuinely nice places to meet our customers and spread knowledge about Microsoft contribution to open source in general and PostgreSQL ecosystem specifically. PGConf DE is one of such great community events. We always look forward to listening to interesting talks, engaging in hallway track discussions, meeting good old #postgresfriends, and of course, making some new ones!