Hussein Nasser: Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18 | The Backend Engineering Show

TL;DR

Postgres 18 just landed with some killer new toys—UUIDv7, the Over explain module, composite index skip scans and, most hyped of all, true asynchronous I/O support.

In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein walks you through sync vs async calls, revisits Postgres 17’s I/O model, then digs into Postgres 18’s async I/O modes (worker threads, io_uring, plus a sync fallback) and tees up future improvements like direct I/O and backend writer enhancements.

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