InfoWorld AI
2026-08-10 16:02 UTC
Score 47.0
USR-0126-20260810-global-ai-ne-e51e210f
Microsoft is betting that the integration of HorizonDB, the cloud-native PostgreSQL alternative it is developing, with Azure will attract more enterprise AI and agentic workloads to its cloud services. Enterprises may not be willing to take that bet. It’s been nine months since Microsoft unveiled HorizonDB , but the service remains in public preview with no announced general availability date. Why put AI projects on hold waiting for HorizonDB to arrive, when AWS, Google, Databricks, Snowflake, and others already have production-ready PostgreSQL services positioned for the same AI workloads that Microsoft says it is building HorizonDB to handle? AWS has had the longest head start. Aurora PostgreSQL became generally available in 2017 and has since evolved from a cloud-native PostgreSQL database into an AI-ready service with vector search and integrations with Amazon Bedrock. Similarly, Google’s AlloyDB , which followed in 2022, now includes AlloyDB AI with vector search, embeddings and model interaction for generative AI and agentic applications. Databricks and Snowflake, too, have their own platform-centric services in the form of Lakebase , which became generally available on AWS and Azure this year, and Snowflake Postgres , which was made generally available in February 2026. As the latecomer, when Microsoft pitched HorizonDB at Ignite in November 2025 it talked up its new architectural approach to cloud-native PostgreSQL, built around disaggregated compute and storage and…