Microsoft buys Citus Data to expand open source PostgreSQL solutions

Microsoft is planning to work with the team of Citus Data to accelerate the delivery of important, enterprise ready features from Microsoft’s Azure to PostgreSQL.

Microsoft has recently confirmed the acquisition of Citus Data, a startup company which is focused on enhancing the scalability of PostgreSQL databases and making them faster. Supposedly, the market for relational databases like PostgreSQL is still growing, mostly due to the tools offered by firms such as Citus that help to overcome some of their previous limitations.

According to reliable sources, the open-source PostgreSQL extension from Citus converts the applications into a distributed database. Microsoft is planning to work with the team of Citus Data to accelerate the delivery of important, enterprise ready features from Microsoft’s Azure to PostgreSQL, enabling the critical workloads of PostgreSQL to run with confidence on Azure.

The co-founders of Citus have effectively confirmed this in their statement, commenting that being a part of Microsoft now, Citus’ team would be focused on building a remarkable database on top of PostgreSQL for providing its users with the game-changing performance, scale and resilience they desire. Existing customers and users of Citus apparently include Agari, Chartbeat, PushOwl as well as some Fortune 100 companies.

Microsoft has now become a crucial open-source contributor and has stressed that it would continue to work with the PostgreSQL community, the sources mentioned. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the acquisition of Citus represents the company’s commitment towards open source and boosting the Azure PostgreSQL scale and performance.

For the record, Citus Data provides database as a service, a free open-source edition as well as an on-premise enterprise version. As of now, it does not seem that this will be changing, but experts suggest Microsoft may transition users of the hosted service to Azure.

Citus Data had been established in 2010 and has earlier raised over US$13 million from investors such as SV Angel, Data Collective and Khosla Ventures. The companies did not reveal the value of the acquisition.