Snowflake, Databricks, and Azure each shipped a Postgres-compatible database with custom storage engines; your existing data platform picks your database.
Key Takeaways
All three are wire-compatible with Postgres but none is stock Postgres: extensions, logical replication behavior, and upgrade timing are all vendor-controlled.
HorizonDB is the most architecturally aggressive: Microsoft built a from-scratch storage engine claiming 3,072 vCores, 128 TB databases, and 3x OLTP throughput vs stock Postgres.
Lakebase (Neon-derived) offers instant branch-per-PR and scale-to-zero; Snowflake Postgres offers the tightest lakehouse-OLTP integration via open-source pg_lake.
Operational tooling (pg_basebackup, pgBackRest, Patroni) does not transfer; query knowledge does.
Most production Postgres fits on a single primary with replicas; the scale-out story applies to a small fraction of workloads.
