Using Microsoft Web IQ to Enhance OpenWebUI: No-Code Web Search and Automatic Link Reading

In my previous article, I migrated the OpenWebUI database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. In my day-to-day use of OpenWebUI, I kept running into two problems: No access to the latest information: Models have a knowledge cutoff. When I ask about recent releases, news, or prices, they either can’t answer or get it wrong. Pasted links are never opened: When I paste the URL of an article, a document, or a GitHub page into the chat and ask the model to summarize, translate, or compare it, the model doesn’t read the link at all. Sometimes it even guesses content that “looks plausible” from the URL alone. Both problems can be solved with OpenWebUI’s web capabilities. In this article, I use Microsoft’s new Microsoft Web IQ as the web search engine, and let the model automatically detect URLs in messages and read the pages before answering. All it takes is creating a Web IQ resource in the Azure portal and then configuring OpenWebUI in its admin UI. No code to write and no extra services to deploy. ...

September 28, 2026 · 13 min

OpenWebUI Database Migration in Practice: Smoothly Migrating from Self-Hosted PostgreSQL on a VM to Azure Database for PostgreSQL

As the volume of users, conversations, files, and knowledge base data in OpenWebUI continued to grow, the self-hosted PostgreSQL instance on an Azure VM created an increasing operational burden, including database patching, backups, disaster recovery, storage monitoring, and security maintenance. To reduce maintenance costs and improve database reliability, I migrated the OpenWebUI application database from PostgreSQL running locally on the VM to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. This migration used the following approach: ...

August 13, 2026 · 18 min