DocumentDB joins the Linux Foundation

We released DocumentDB—our fully permissive, PostgreSQL backed, open-source document database project earlier this year. In just a few short months, the project has gained escalating engagement from the developer community—many of whom expressed enthusiasm to both use and contribute to the solution. The project grew to nearly 2,000 GitHub stars, with issues, discussions, and feature requests flooding in—initially from Postgres enthusiasts. What started as a pair of Postgres extensions, serving as the platform for a NoSQL database implementation, quickly evolved into a user-friendly and MongoDB compatible solution with the recently released gateway protocol translation layer. With a higher-level abstraction now available, users no longer need to manipulate Postgres queries and can get an end-to-end, open-source MongoDB compatible solution. Today, we are excited to announce yet another milestone in DocumentDB’s journey: the project is officially joining the Linux Foundation.

Why join the Linux Foundation?

The project’s mission statement and overarching principles remain the same—building a truly open, developer first database on top of Postgres. Joining the foundation is the next step in that commitment, as well as eventually creating an open standard for NoSQL databases. While the value proposition of document datastores over relational databases is clear, establishing a standard like the ANSI SQL standard for relational databases would be invaluable. Joining the Linux Foundation will create an independent identity for DocumentDB and provide a conduit for any database provider to contribute to our mission. In addition, Postgres continues to be hailed as the overwhelming favorite platform of choice and will continue to serve as the project’s backbone. For DocumentDB, open-source Postgres will be favored over a forked version of Postgres. The Linux Foundation will ensure these governing principles are adhered to by DocumentDB to maintain consistency.

Developer first

From its inception, DocumentDB has been built with developer freedom in mind. Under the MIT license, users have the utmost freedom to use the project as they please. Originally, only the Postgres extensions were open source. At that time, users needed to manipulate Postgres queries by interacting directly with the database engine for a NoSQL experience—while powerful, it required extensive low-level plumbing. Although this served the cohort of developers looking to contribute right away, NoSQL database users needed more. Now, with the release of the gateway as a higher-level abstraction, developers can apply their existing MongoDB expertise to interact with the project. For the engine, we are committed to remaining Postgres first—relying solely on the open-source version and not on forks. Similarly, we are committed to supporting only the MongoDB wire protocol and remaining backwards compatible. Joining the Linux Foundation will only further our developer-first mindset by ensuring these principles are followed.

Growing community, growing structure

One of our most exciting developments has been the number of organizations who expressed interest in both adopting the extension, as well as contributing to the project’s code base. Some had already built a significant presence in the open-source Postgres community and were looking to expand the scope of their projects. Others were seasoned vets in providing managed database services and curious to incorporate DocumentDB into their products. With the project’s origin rooted in the Microsoft organization on GitHub, a central and neutral home was needed for more open collaboration. In addition, with a growing list of enthusiastic contributors, we needed more structure. A Technical Steering Committee (TSC) was formed to guide executive decisions on the vision and roadmap, along with being the face of the project. A coterie of maintainers was created to gatekeep check-ins and uphold the project’s standards. Contributing to the foundation accelerated these improvements.

By contributing DocumentDB to the Linux Foundation, Microsoft is ensuring the community’s ownership of the project. This move underscores our shared commitment to advancing open-source innovation and empowering developers with powerful, flexible tools built on PostgreSQL. Collaborating with Microsoft on the DocumentDB extension for Yugabyte has been an exciting project, and we look forward to joining the technical steering committee and continuing to contribute to the roadmap of distributed document databases together.

Karthik Ranganathan, Co-Founder and CEO, Yugabyte.

Distributed databases are important part of modern stack and is a core expertise of SingleStore. It is great to see a community driven, open distributed document database project with true open-source permissive license, and broad industry participation. With our recently launched MongoDB compatible offering, we are excited to explore compatibility with DocumentDB. We are particularly encouraged by the project joining the Linux Foundation as it ensures open collaboration.

Nadeem Asghar, Chief Product and Technology Officer, SingleStore.

What’s next?

As DocumentDB enters its next chapter with the Linux Foundation, we’re carving out a path where document databases are open, interoperable, and standardized—built with the flexibility of NoSQL and the reliability of Postgres. This move isn’t just symbolic; it reflects a concrete shift in how we build and govern the project moving forward. We’ve launched a new GitHub organization, documentdb, which will serve as the project’s new home. All development, issues, and discussions are now happening in the repo under the new org: https://github.com/documentdb/documentdb.

Be sure to update your bookmarks and forks accordingly. Whether you are looking for a NoSQL database solution, eager to contribute, or simply want to check us out—star our GitHub repo to stay updated, and join our community on Discord to ask questions and communicate directly with our Technical Steering Committee.

Let’s continue building together.

Kirill Gavrylyuk

VP at Microsoft

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