Microsoft has bought San Francisco-based open source database management system (DBMS) Citus Data for an undisclosed sum, the company said today.

Citus Data, founded in 2010, beat MongoDB and Redis into second and third place respectively in a 2018 ranking of Relational and NoSQL DBMSs.

The company, last backed financially in a $9.5 million Oct 20, 2015 Series A funding round and which packages an open source extension of PostgreSQL, said it will “stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL”.

Citus Data: “Absolutely Thrilled”

Umur Cubukcu, Citus Data CEO and co-founder said: “We launched our Citus Cloud database as a service and grew it to power billions of transactions every day—creating the world’s first horizontally scalable relational database that you can run both on premises, and as a fully-managed service on the cloud.”

PostgreSQL is 30-year-old open source relational database management system. It provides a collection of data items organised as a set of tables with columns and rows.

Citus Data provides an extension on top of this allows users to distribute that database user queries across multiple nodes.

It supports rich data types and extensions like JSONB, PostGIS, HyperLogLog, pg_stat_statements, and full text search. It works with  Ruby, Python, Java, Node.js, Javascript, Go and C++.

Citus Data

Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s Corporate VP, Azure Data said: “The acquisition of Citus Data builds on Azure’s open source commitment and enables us to provide the massive scalability and performance our customers demand as their workloads grow.”

“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.”

See also: MongoDB Lets Rip at AWS After Amazon’s DocumentDB Launch

The company added: “This builds on our other open source investments in SQL Server on Linux, a multi-model NoSQL database with Azure Cosmos DB, and support for open source analytics with the Spark and Hadoop ecosystems.”

The acquisition will allow 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 added.