Dingding Lu

Why we built Azure HorizonDB for PostgreSQL

local PDT (Livestream 3)

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.