Microsoft buys Citus Data to boost open source database in the cloud

Microsoft has acquired database business Citus Data in the hope it'll be able to offer customers access to scalable databases on PostgreSQL.

The company said it wants to offer developers access to more scalable and flexible systems to deal with larger data volumes in a faster fashion. It says the integration of Citus Data's software into its platform will allow for more advanced data-led insights.

Citus Data is an open source extension to PostgreSQL that transforms the technology into a distributed database. It's available as a fully-managed database as a service, as enterprise software, and as a free open source download, making it flexible enough to integrate into a business's existing infrastructure.

"Together, Microsoft and Citus Data will further unlock the power of data, enabling customers to scale complex multi-tenant SaaS applications and accelerate the time to insight with real-time analytics over billions of rows, all with the familiar PostgreSQL tools developers know and love," said Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data.

Although PostgreSQL is always available as a managed service on Azure Cloud (as well as AWS), Microsoft will integrate Citus Data so it's available for all workloads, whether in the cloud or on-premise environments.

"We created Citus to transform PostgreSQL into a distributed databasegiving developers game-changing performance improvements and delivering queries that are magnitudes faster than proprietary implementations of Postgres," said Umur Cubukcu, co-founder and CEO of Citus.

Microsoft is ramping up partnerships with open source businesses at the moment, with last year's acquisition of GitHub, possibly the biggest open source community in the world.