Post Content
Understand why Azure HorizonDB was built for PostgreSQL performance and scale. Dingding Lu (Microsoft) explains this architecture in her talk “Why we built Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL” at POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026. Abstract: Modern Postgres workloads keep running into the same questions: How do you get consistent performance when traffic suddenly spikes? How do you keep latency predictable? How do you scale reads without bolting on more replicas than needed? What do failovers look like when you can’t afford long down times?
This talk digs into why our Postgres team at Microsoft built Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL, a shared storage architecture designed to handle those pressures. We’ll walk through the core design decisions behind HorizonDB: what database as logs means, how storage and compute are separated, how scale‑out works, and more.
If you are interested in which problems HorizonDB is meant to solve, what differentiates it from other managed PostgreSQL offerings in Azure, or how you can leverage HorizonDB for your workloads—then this session will help you make sense of it.
Dingding is a Principal PM in the Azure Data PostgreSQL team at Microsoft. Most of her career has been spent on building products for OLTP and OLAP databases. Prior roles include Azure SQL product team, Tableau, Snowflake and CockroachDB.
► Video chapters:
⏩ 00:00 – Music & introduction
⏩ 00:57 – Opportunity for Postgres to run better on Azure
⏩ 02:04 – HorizonDB architecture and core design
⏩ 03:20 – Separating compute and storage layers
⏩ 05:08 – Rust and Azure HorizonDB
⏩ 06:10 – Shared WAL storage and commit latency
⏩ 09:31 – Write lifecycle and WAL filtering explained
⏩ 11:22 – Faster failover with stateless nodes
⏩ 13:44 – Read performance with SSD caching
⏩ 15:05 – Data storage sharding and resilience
⏩ 16:18 – Auto-scaling storage and point-in-time restore
⏩ 18:04 – Key takeaways
📕 Everything you need to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres can be found at: https://posetteconf.com
✅ Learn more: watch more POSETTE talks: https://aka.ms/posette-playlist
📌 Let’s connect:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/posetteconf/
X – @PosetteConf, https://x.com/PosetteConf
Mastodon – @posetteconf, https://mastodon.social/@posetteconf
Bluesky – @posetteconf.com, https://aka.ms/posette-on-bluesky
Microsoft for Postgres LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-for-postgresql
#PosetteConf #PostgreSQL #Azure Read More Microsoft Developer
