Today, we announced the acquisition of Citus Data, an innovative open source extension to scale out PostgreSQL databases without the need to re-architect existing applications. Citus Data delivers unparalleled performance and scalability by intelligently distributing data and queries across multiple nodes, which makes sharding simple. Because Citus Data is packaged as an extension (not a fork) to PostgreSQL, customers can take advantage of all the innovations in community PostgreSQL with queries that are significantly faster compared to proprietary implementations of PostgreSQL.
In this blog, I would like to share how we will work closely together with Citus Data to bring a differentiated PostgreSQL offering to our customers. Our objective since the beginning of our journey in bringing PostgreSQL database to Microsoft Azure has been to provide our customers with the best enterprise grade managed PostgreSQL service in the cloud. We are proud to offer innovations on Azure Database for PostgreSQL such as built-in high availability that can help save customers over half the costs versus other clouds, and capability to scale up or down compute in seconds, helping customers easily adjust to changes in workload demands. Additionally, built-in intelligent features such as auto-tuning help customers further lower their TCO by having customized recommendations and insights to maximize the performance of their PostgreSQL databases. These benefits, coupled with built-in security and compliance, Azure’s global reach, and Azure IP advantage, free up more time for customers to focus on their business and applications. We pair all this value with a community-based engine model, so our customers are not locked in.
As open source relational databases grow on Azure, we continue to see accelerated adoption from customers across various industry verticals serving diverse, mission-critical application patterns ranging from complex analytical applications for digital marketing to machine learning based IoT applications. These applications demand low latency and high query processing throughput, and our investment in Citus Data is a powerful accelerant to deliver high performance and scalable distributed databases.
PostgreSQL is one of the fastest growing open source relational database engines that is loved and embraced by enterprise developers. Citus Data complements Microsoft’s approach to community PostgreSQL with its innovative open source extension built on PostgreSQL. With Citus Data technology, Microsoft will be able to offer customers unparalleled performance and scale for their PostgreSQL databases on top of the innovative, intelligent and secure Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
We are very excited to welcome the Citus Data team to Microsoft and to build on the culture of contribution to the open source community! We look forward to accelerating an open PostgreSQL and can’t wait to see how to see how this technology advances our customer’s business needs.
Check out the following blog post from Rohan Kumar, CVP Azure Data group to learn more about this exciting development.