Microsoft has announced it has acquired a new startup company to help its big data and analysis technology. In a blog post, the company says it snapped up Citus Data, a startup that creates an extension for an open source database management system called PostgreSQL.
The extension is a useful tool because it transforms PostgreSQL into a full distributed database. Microsoft did not detail the specific of the deal. As for Citus Data, the company says it will continue to build its infrastructure on PostgreSQL.
“As part of Microsoft, we will stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL that gives our users the game-changing scale, performance, and resilience they need. We will continue to drive innovation in this space,” Citus CEO Umur Cubukcu wrote.
“We remain as committed to our customers as ever, and will continue providing the strong support for the products our customers use today. And we will continue to actively participate in the Postgres community, working on the Citus open source extension as well as the other open source Postgres extensions you love.”
Microsoft
Citus Data was created by Cubukcu and Sumedh Pathak eight years ago. Working on relational databases, the company developed a customized solution for real-time analytics dashboards and and reconciling transactional and analytical workloads.
Discussing the partnership, Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Azure Data said Citus provides performance advantages. The company gives “the performance advantages of a horizontally scalable database while staying current with all the latest innovations in PostgreSQL.”
“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,” Kumar said. “[W]e will accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence.”
