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

Asynchronous IO finally lands in Postgres 18

Postgres 18 packs a punch with UUIDv7, composite index skip scans, an improved EXPLAIN module—and the pièce de résistance: asynchronous I/O support. In an episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein Nasser breaks down sync vs. async calls, revisits Postgres 17’s I/O model, then dives deep on the new worker-based and io_uring methods (plus fallback to sync) that promise huge performance gains.

Why you should care

This release isn’t “done” yet—expect further backend-writer support, direct I/O tweaks and even fancier worker optimizations—but it’s already a massive step toward squeezing every drop of throughput from your database.

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