HorizonDB

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Azure HorizonDB is a fully managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service, designed for mission-critical applications and AI-native workloads that need fast throughput, sub-millisecond latency, and large storage limits. The service decouples compute and storage, allowing automatic scaling up to 3,072 vCores and 128TB of storage. The service uses a cluster of compute replicas that share a single copy of the data in a write-ahead log service that minimizes bottlenecks often found in large-scale applications and supports high-end AI vector search.

The service entered public preview June 2, 2026, about six months after Microsoft announced it at Ignite 2025; as a preview it carries no service level agreement and isn’t licensed for production use.

Product: HorizonDB

Licensing: HorizonDB (Not released)

Near-Term Updates and Roadmap (2026–2027)

Microsoft is building a second, premium scale-out PostgreSQL service alongside the one it already sells, Database for PostgreSQL Elastic Cluster. However, HorizonDB is aimed squarely at Amazon Aurora and Google AlloyDB. HorizonDB will have a shared storage architecture that scales to 128TB and a separate cluster-based compute layer that can scale to 3,072 vCores. It’s also adding AI-specific features like filtered vector indexing and AI models provisioning inside the database.