PGDay UK2026

Microsoft offers two managed services for PostgreSQL: Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure HorizonDB.

Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a fully-managed, AI-ready database service that supports all major open-source PostgreSQL versions and is widely used for production workloads today. Just a few of the things that make the service unique:

• Resiliency across 65+ regions with built in multi-zone high availability, cross-region replication and Chaos Studio integration;
• Trusted data security and compliance features;
• Direct mirroring to Microsoft Fabric;
• The popular VS Code extension for PostgreSQL, now evolved into a full Postgres IDE; and
• Elastic clusters for horizontal scale, powered by open-source Citus.

Azure HorizonDB, now in public preview, is Microsoft’s next-generation cloud‑native, high‑performance PostgreSQL-compatible service designed for mission critical workloads. Charles Feddersen and Affan Dar, describe details of Azure HorizonDB in this announcement blog from June. To dive deeper into the technical backstory of Azure HorizonDB, you can watch this talk from distinguished engineer Adam Prout at Carnegie Mellon from earlier in 2026, titled: HorizonDB: Co‑Designing PostgreSQL and Azure for Cloud‑Native OLTP.

Adam Wolk (Principal Program Manager in the Postgres team at Microsoft) will be staffing the Microsoft booth at PGDay UK 2026. Stop by to connect with the team, ask questions about Microsoft's data and AI services, and learn more about Azure HorizonDB. We'll also have plenty of our popular PostgreSQL socks to give away. Complete a quick 3‑minute survey at the booth and you'll get a second pair as a token of our appreciation. Whether you're a PostgreSQL user, developer, architect, DBA, or simply interested in modern cloud data platforms, we'd love to chat about your projects and challenges.

We chose to sponsor PGDay UK because events like this play an important role in bringing the PostgreSQL community together to exchange ideas and build new connections. Microsoft is proud to support PGDay UK for the 3rd time—and to help make this gathering possible. At the same time, it gives us an opportunity to share what we're building for PostgreSQL, including our new managed service, Azure HorizonDB.

Microsoft ♥ Postgres

We believe that participation in open source means shaping, supporting, and growing the ecosystem. Microsoft contributes to PostgreSQL in several ways, to the PostgreSQL ecosystem including

• Azure Database for PostgreSQL: Fully managed, AI-ready database as a service for PostgreSQL. aka.ms/azure-postgres​
• Azure HorizonDB: New PostgreSQL-compatible database service to build & scale mission-critical applications. aka.ms/azure-horizondb​
• Talking Postgres podcast: A monthly podcast about the people who work on Postgres & why they do what they do. TalkingPostgres.com​
• Microsoft Blog for PostgreSQL: Our blog about Postgres, Azure, and our Postgres community initiatives. aka.ms/microsoft-blog-postgres
• Upstream Contributions to Postgres: Microsoft employs Postgres committers & contributors working directly on upstream Postgres—plus a team working on open source extensions.​ aka.ms/pg-at-microsoft​
• Supporting Postgres Events: Microsoft sponsors—and helps to organize—PostgreSQL conferences & user groups worldwide.
• Visual Studio Code Extension for PostgreSQL​: VS Code extension for PostgreSQL with over 689K installs. Works with any Postgres database. aka.ms/pgsql-vscode​
• POSETTE: An Event for Postgres​: Free & virtual developer event with livestreams and expert speakers from the Postgres ecosystem. PosetteConf.com​

Microsoft is also a Benefactor sponsor of the PostgreSQL Community Association (PGCA) which is a Canadian non-profit chartered by the PostgreSQL Core Team in 2011 to hold and protect the Postgres brand assets globally.

Microsoft's contributions to the PostgreSQL open source project—starting with Postgres 12 back in 2019—span multiple releases and subsystems. One contribution we're particularly proud of is helping bring PostgreSQL's Asynchronous I/O infrastructure to life, a major architectural change that landed in PostgreSQL 18 and continues to evolve in PostgreSQL 19. In PostgreSQL 19, Microsoft contributors have improved key areas of the database, including:

• Query planner: better execution plans and more consistent query performance
• Executor: faster execution of complex queries and lower CPU overhead
• Storage & I/O: continued work on PostgreSQL's new asynchronous I/O infrastructure
• Security: authentication and security enhancements
• Operations & manageability: improvements for monitoring and administration
• SQL language: new SQL functionality and standards-compliance improvements

In addition to Microsoft's code contributions to PostgreSQL, our team also makes non-code contributions to the PostgreSQL community. Together, these efforts create valuable feedback loops between contributors and users, helping PostgreSQL continue to evolve based on community feedback. For a deeper dive into Microsoft's contributions to Postgres, see the latest version of our annual blog post: What's New with Postgres at Microsoft, 2026 Edition, by Claire Giordano.

A few of our favorite talks (there are too many to list) from the Microsoft team at PGConf.dev 2026 include:

• Batching in the Executor, by Amit Langote: This talk presents early results and discusses how batch-aware execution could help PostgreSQL scale more efficiently for large workloads.
• Profiling Postgres Perils, by Andres Freund: About practical lessons and troubleshooting techniques to help PostgreSQL developers and contributors profile, benchmark, and validate performance improvements more effectively.
• Text encoding débacles, by Thomas Munro: A deep dive into the complexities of text encodings in PostgreSQL.
• Let's talk about building the next generation of Postgres open source contributors, by Claire Giordano: Discussing how to grow and support future PostgreSQL contributors.
• Optimizing code in the hot path; with examples from tuple deformation, by David Rowley: Examining low-level PostgreSQL performance optimisation techniques.