The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, is announcing that DocumentDB—a fast-growing open source document database from Microsoft—has joined the foundation as an open source project under the permissive MIT license. Amid its increasing popularity, DocumentDB’s participation with Linux Foundation drives vendor-neutrality, encourages broader collaboration, and maintains its PostgreSQL-first vision.
DocumentDB, a project that began in 2024 as PostgreSQL extensions, now boasts 2,000 GitHub stars and hundreds of contributions, feedback, and adoption instances. Originally designed to add support for BSON data models and document queries to the PostgreSQL ecosystem, DocumentDB is now a complete, intuitive, MIT-licensed open source document database solution on top of PostgreSQL. Additionally compatible with popular open source MongoDB drivers, DocumentDB is upheld for its extensibility and interoperability.
“DocumentDB fills a critical gap in the document database ecosystem, attracting contributors, users, and champions. What’s even more exciting is it provides an open standard for document- based applications, like what SQL did for relational databases,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “By joining the Linux Foundation, DocumentDB is securing its open source future and helping chart a new path for NoSQL database standards and community-driven innovation.”
“We built DocumentDB with a simple goal: Give developers an open document database with the flexibility of NoSQL and the power, reliability, openness, and ecosystem of Postgres,” said Kirill Gavrylyuk, vice president at Microsoft. “In just a few months, the community has embraced the project. By joining the Linux Foundation, we’re deepening our commitment to transparency, open governance, and developer-first principles—ensuring DocumentDB remains an open, extensible document database developers can confidently build on for years to come.”
By joining the Linux Foundation, DocumentDB reiterates its dedication to creating an open, interoperable, and developer-friendly document database on top of PostgreSQL, according to the Linux Foundation. The success of this commitment is already evident, having gained participation and support from industry leaders including AWS, Cockroach Labs, Google, Microsoft, Rippling, SingleStore, Snowflake, Supabase, Ubicloud, and Yugabyte.
“It’s great that Microsoft, AWS and others are joining forces to work on DocumentDB, an open source implementation of a MongoDB-compatible API on top of PostgreSQL. Microsoft and AWS already work together to enhance Postgres, so it is logical they would use the high-quality Postgres source code and leverage its extensibility to meet the need for an open source document database,” said Bruce Momjian, founding member of the PostgreSQL core development team. “The idea of using Postgres in this way has been around for a long time so I am glad it is now getting serious traction. DocumentDB should be an interesting alternative to users wanting an open source implementation, and for database users who just want a simpler interface to PostgreSQL.”
To learn more, please visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/.