Under the MIT license, developers get maximum freedom in using DocumentDB. They can choose between PostgreSQL interfaces for stronger JSON support or MongoDB compatibility for existing expertise. "We are committed to 100% compatibility with MongoDB drivers," Microsoft emphasizes. This developer-first mentality is also reflected in the simple implementation. It takes less than a minute to get DocumentDB up and running. Contributing to the project takes even less time, which keeps the barrier to entry low.
A key part of the redesign was improving how results are retrieved. Traditional keyword search excels at matching exact product attributes, for example, a query like "pesto pasta sauce 8oz" benefits from precise lexical matching. But broader intent-driven queries, such as "healthy foods", are better handled through semantic retrieval, which understands relationships between terms and concepts. By combining both approaches in Postgres, Instacart can balance precision (returning only relevant results) with recall (capturing as many relevant items as possible), ensuring that customers see both the exact products they're looking for and meaningful options for discovery.
Postgres is becoming the default database of the world, and you still can't do good search over that information, believe it or not. There's just a lot of pain points.
The addition of the managed PostgreSQL database to the Data Intelligence platform will allow developers to quickly build and deploy AI agents without having to concurrently scale compute and storage.