Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18 TL;DR

Postgres 18 just dropped with a bunch of goodies—think UUIDv7, an “over explain” module, composite-index skip scans and, most importantly, true asynchronous I/O. In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein walks through the difference between sync vs async calls, revisits Postgres 17’s sync I/O, then dives deep into the new async I/O modes: the classic worker queue and the shiny new io_uring implementation (plus the fallback sync method).

He also teases ongoing work—support for backend writers, direct I/O, and more optimizations—so you know Postgres async I/O is only getting started. Whether you’re a DBA, dev, or performance nerd, this one’s packed with practical insights and real-world benchmarks.

Watch on YouTube