During the recent Microsoft Ignite conference, the cloud provider announced the early preview of Azure HorizonDB, a managed Postgres-compatible database service for enterprise workloads.
According to the announcement, HorizonDB will support up to 3072 vCores across primary and replica nodes, and the auto-scaling shared storage supports up to 128TB databases, claiming sub-millisecond multi-zone commit latencies. Affan Dar, VP of Engineering at Microsoft, and Charles Feddersen, partner director at Microsoft, write:
Developers benefit from the robust Postgres ecosystem and seamless integration with Azure’s advanced AI capabilities, while enterprises can gain a secure, highly available, and performant cloud database to host their business applications.
With the new AI Model Management feature, the database integrates Microsoft Foundry models directly into the customer database and claims to provide up to 3x faster vector search with advanced DiskANN filtering compared to HNSW. The development team explains:
Advanced Filtering addresses a common problem in vector search – combining vector search with filtering (…) DiskANN Advanced Filtering solves this by combining filter and search into one operation – while the graph of vectors is traversed during the vector search, each vector is also checked for filter predicate match, ensuring that only the correct vectors are retrieved.
Adam Prout, partner architect at Microsoft and former CTO and co-founder at SingleStore, writes:
HorizonDB pairs upstream compatibility with disaggregated storage designed to make Postgres really shine. We’re pushing as much replication and durability work as we can into the storage layer leaving more CPU for PostgreSQL to run queries and transactions. It reduces commit latencies, make failovers fast and predictable, and scale reads across replicas while integrating with Azure security and AI tooling.
To improve database management, Microsoft is introducing new capabilities in the PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code and announcing its general availability.
Azure HorizonDB adds to Microsoft’s existing managed PostgreSQL products: Azure Database for PostgreSQL, the general-purpose managed database for traditional workloads, and Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, the sharded option based on Citus for horizontally scaled workloads.
The new service differs from the existing offerings by providing a shared-storage, scale-out compute architecture optimized for AI workloads. Microsoft is not the only cloud provider targeting distributed PostgreSQL workloads, with Amazon Aurora and Google’s AlloyDB being its main competitors. Luke Fangman, cloud and AI managing director at Microsoft, comments:
For those in the know, we have been waiting for Microsoft to finally take on Aurora to give enterprise true choice when you need globally scalable & performant PostgreSQL engines.
The recording of the Ignite session “Azure HorizonDB: Deep Dive into a New Enterprise-Scale PostgreSQL” is now available. During the early preview, HorizonDB will only be available in a subset of regions.
