Microsoft is sure delving deep into open source software these days. Who would have taken this notion seriously 10-15 years ago?

Mack.

Microsoft SQL Server was released in 1989, as was Postgres, which became PostgreSQL in 1996. I found that out when looking around to try to get an idea of how the two compared. I was under the mistaken impression that PostgreSQL was a lot less mature. I know that it's been powerful in the RDBMS market and that it's been nipping at Microsoft's heels for quite some time.

So this Citrus tool transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database... A very interesting acquisition for Microsoft. Their Azure service has been playing catch-up to AWS in terms of open source support. These sort of investments are very telling about the way that they're going to be (possibly) more inclusive in the types of services that they're going to offer in the future.

Postgres is my favourite database. Very solid and "does the right thing" consistently. It has a really good features set: support for multiple embedded languages, plain text search, NoSQL like features (you can have columns that contain arrays, key value pairs, validated and indexable JSON (much better than having it in a character field).....