Interview with Microsoft
Find out more about our sponsor Microsoft
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of the PostgreSQL Conference Europe 2025 organization, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
Which of your company’s contributions to the PostgreSQL Project (code/community/conference) are you most proud of?
The team at Microsoft is excited about so many new capabilities in Postgres 18 but if we had to pick one contribution in this release that we’ve been involved with, it would have to be Asynchronous I/O—a game-changing (that is not hyperbole) architectural change that has been years in the making.
PostgreSQL committer Thomas Munro of Microsoft explains it well in Claire Giordano’s blog post: “Seeing the Async I/O subsystem land in Postgres 18 is really cool. It's a big step forward—a foundation for a whole new I/O architecture that opens the door to modern and efficient I/O technologies. It's been awesome to be able to help Andres Freund with this project (I worked on portability, vectored I/O, streaming APIs, and other preparatory work, and others contributed too—but Andres is the architect and driving force of the new subsystem.) Finding a path to land these changes incrementally across releases has been a challenge. And we're not done yet. The interesting work continues.”
What is your PostgreSQL centered product and what makes it unique?
Our PostgreSQL centered product is Azure Database for PostgreSQL. It's a managed service that hosts all supported major versions of open-source PostgreSQL. We make no changes to community Postgres, but leverage Azure to give you managed resiliency and security along with high-performance and cost effectiveness.
One area that makes Azure Database for PostgreSQL unique is the ecosystem we provide for developers, from the popular VS Code PostgreSQL extension to LangChain and LangGraph connectors for building enterprise-ready AI agents. Another area is security. In addition to standard options like private networking and transparent data encryption, Azure Database for PostgreSQL is the only managed Postgres service to include Entra authentication—allowing a centralized identity-based security perimeter. Our new Confidential Compute SKUs provide trusted execution environments for encrypted VM memory without compromising performance.
Another area of uniqueness is resiliency, which is critical for customers who rely on automated geo-redundant backup, zone-resilient HA and geo-redundant replication, and a global presence of 60+ Azure regions to ensure worldwide reach.
Will anyone from your team be presenting at PostgreSQL Conference Europe?
If you are a first-time PGConf EU attendee, you are in for a treat: the PGConf EU conference is a fan favorite in the Postgres world. The event is so popular, people mark their calendars a year in advance to ensure they can attend again the next time. The conference gives you an opportunity to skill up and to influence the future of the Postgres—by talking to contributors in the hallways.
There are so many good talks to choose from, it may be a struggle to decide! In your schedule planning, please be sure to check out these talks by our Microsoft speakers:
- Adam Wolk will give the Microsoft sponsored session: Pushing Postgres Forward: From Open Source Contributions to Intelligent Tuning
- Andres Freund: AIO in PG18 and beyond
- Claire Giordano: Behind Postgres 18: The People, the Code, & the Invisible Work
- Melanie Plageman: Improved Freezing in Postgres Vacuum: From Idea to Commit
- Naisila Puka: How to explain PostgreSQL to kids
- Teresa Giacomini is a co-organizer of one of the Community Events Day summits: Community Summit, PGConf EU edition
- Tomas Vondra: Fast-path locking improvements in PG18
- Taras Kloba: PostgreSQL as a Graph Database: Who Grabbed a Beer Together?
