Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18 TL;DR

Postgres 18 just landed with a host of neat upgrades—from native UUIDv7 and a souped-up EXPLAIN module to composite index skip scans and, most hyped of all, true asynchronous IO support via both “worker” and io_uring modes. This tackles the old Postgres 17 sync-only I/O bottleneck and lays the groundwork for snappier, non-blocking disk operations.

In this Backend Engineering Show episode, Hussein walks you through sync vs. async calls, the challenges of adding async I/O to Postgres, and a deep dive into each io_method (worker, io_uring, even the fallback sync). He also teases future goodies like backend‐writer support and direct I/O—making it a perfect byte-sized brain boost for anyone leveling up their database and backend game.

Watch on YouTube