pg_trgm Extension Not Allowed on Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server – Alternatives and Cloud Comparison

Rishav Arora 25 Reputation points
2025-08-28T10:05:16.4733333+00:00

Dear Microsoft Community,

We are currently exploring advanced search functionality for our application hosted on Azure Database for PostgreSQL (Flexible Server). Our use case involves fuzzy text search on a product catalog, specifically using a string column that contains product descriptions.

To achieve this, we intended to use the PostgreSQL pg_trgm extension, which supports trigram-based similarity searching and indexing. However, when attempting to enable the extension, we encountered the following error:

ERROR:  extension 'pg_trgm' is not allow-listed for users in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

We would like to understand the following:

  1. Is there a way to enable pg_trgm in Flexible Server, or are there plans to allow it in the near future?
  2. What are the alternatives for achieving fuzzy or approximate search in Azure PostgreSQL if pg_trgm is not supported?
  3. Is this limitation specific to Azure, or do other cloud providers (e.g., AWS RDS for PostgreSQL, Google Cloud SQL) support the pg_trgm extension out of the box?

Best regards,

Rishav

Azure Database for PostgreSQL
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