In the last twelve months, three of the biggest data-platform companies have shipped a Postgres-flavored database with a custom storage layer and a “scale-out compute, shared storage” architecture. Snowflake Postgres is GA, built on the Crunchy Data team’s work, with pg_lake as the lakehouse hook. Databricks Lakebase is GA on AWS, public preview on Azure, built on the Neon engine plus the Mooncake integration work. Azure HorizonDB is in invite-only preview and is the most aggressive of the three architecturally — Microsoft built their own engine, claims up to 3,072 vCores and 128 TB databases, and benchmarks 3× the throughput of stock Postgres on OLTP. All three are wire-compatible with Postgres. None of them is Postgres in the sense that matters to you. The question isn’t which one is best — they’re targeting overlapping but distinct workloads, and the meaningful answer depends on questions about your environment, not theirs.…