Postgres 16 available in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, powered by Citus

Nik Larin

Big news in the Postgres world: PostgreSQL 16 was released just over 2 weeks ago. And today we’re announcing that Postgres 16 is generally available for production workloads on Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. That’s right, in production: this announcement is not just a preview of Postgres 16 support. 

Whether you need to provision a new distributed Postgres cluster in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL—or upgrade your existing database clusters—Postgres 16 is now an option for you.  

And you can use Azure Portal, Bicep or ARM templates, REST APIs, Azure SDKs, or Azure CLI to spin up a new Postgres 16 cluster in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, or to upgrade an existing cluster to Postgres 16. 

PostgreSQL 16 + Citus 12 now available in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL  

Giving you access to new capabilities in Postgres is a priority for the Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL team. And because Citus—which powers Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL—is an open source database extension (and not a fork!), it makes it easier for us to keep Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL current with the latest Postgres releases.  

A lot of focused engineering work to keep up-to-date with the Postgres 16 beta and RC candidate releases over the last months allowed to bring all Postgres 16 benefits to Citus extension and Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL that fast. In fact, the Citus 12.1 open source release came out with Postgres 16 support just 1 week after the Postgres 16 release.

Of course, making Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL available on the latest versions of Postgres also involves a rigorous QA process, too. Here are some details about the QA and release process published last year for Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, shortly after Postgres 15 was released. 

Lots of improvements, small and large, in Postgres 16 

Highlights of the innovations featured in the PostgreSQL 16 release notes (that many of us are excited about) include: 

• query performance improvements with more parallelism;  
• developer experience enhancements;  
• monitoring of I/O stats using pg_stat_io view; and  
• enhanced security features 
• and more…. 

Not only PostgreSQL 16 

While some workloads get tangible benefits from the latest Postgres versions, other applications are just fine running on an older PostgreSQL version. Which is why Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL supports all current Postgres versions: Postgres 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and now 16. “All current Postgres versions” means all the PostgreSQL versions that are supported by PostgreSQL community.  

And if you run your cluster on PostgreSQL 14 or 15, you also get access to the latest version of the Citus database extension: Citus 12.x. 

Learn more about PostgreSQL 16 and Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL 

If you want to give Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL a try, start with the Quickstart or free trial. More links and resources below. Happy hacking! 

• PostgreSQL 16 release notes 
• Citus 12.1 release notes 
• Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL cluster Postgres / Citus version upgrade 
• Major PostgreSQL version support in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL

Nik Larin Principal Program Manager

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