Azure HorizonDB^_PREVIEW

Azure HorizonDB is Microsoft’s next-generation cloud‑native, high‑performance PostgreSQL-compatible service designed for mission critical workloads. It decouples compute and storage with an auto-scaling zone resilient storage layer and offers horizontal read scale‑out without impacting Postgres replication, predictable low latency and enterprise grade security. Azure HorizonDB is built for developers, offering advanced AI capabilities such as DiskANN with advanced filtering, one-click integration with Microsoft Foundry, and zero-ETL mirroring to Microsoft Fabric Onelake.

Azure HorizonDB is built on a “database-as-logs” architecture with full separation of compute and storage. This design enables transactions to be committed directly to shared write-ahead log (WAL) storage. In traditional open-source PostgreSQL architectures, committing a transaction typically requires multiple coordination steps. In Azure HorizonDB, transactions commit in a single step to shared storage, reducing coordination overhead, lowering latency, and improving overall performance.

Azure HorizonDB is a fully-managed, cloud-native PostgreSQL-compatible database service architected to deliver performance, resilience, and security for high-throughput, data-intensive applications. Azure HorizonDB gives you faster provisioning times and lower write latency. It can quickly scale more compute and storage, with more scale-out capacity for heavy read operations. By contrast, Azure Database for PostgreSQL is our database service for running open source PostgreSQL on Azure, delivering a fully managed experience for traditional PostgreSQL deployments.

Azure HorizonDB is currently available in a limited set of Azure regions during public preview. As the service continues to evolve, availability will expand to additional regions.

For the most up-to-date list of supported regions, refer to documentation.

Pricing for Azure HorizonDB is pay-as-you-go, with compute billed per vCore and based on the compute you provision for both the primary instance and high availability replicas. Storage allocated to data and logs is billed in GiB/month. There is no charge for backup storage for up to 100% of the total initial size of your cluster. Additional backup storage consumption will be charged in GiB/month.

Microsoft has approximately 19 employees who actively contribute to the PostgreSQL open-source community in a variety of ways, including:

• Authoring code and submitting new features or improvements
• Reviewing commits and ensuring code quality
• Serving as committers (also known as maintainers in other open-source projects)
• Holding leadership roles, such as positions on the PostgreSQL core team
• Supporting community education and advocacy, helping users learn and adopt PostgreSQL
   

In fact, Microsoft is one of the top upstream code contributors to the PostgreSQL open-source project. Learn more about why we contribute to Postgres open source in our annual “What’s new with Postgres at Microsoft” blog post.