TL;DR

Postgres 18 just landed with some neat upgrades—UUIDv7 support, a beefed-up “Over explain” module, composite index skip scans, and the big showstopper: true asynchronous I/O. You can now choose between a dedicated worker model or the ultra-low-latency io_uring path (with good old sync still available as a fallback).

In this Backend Engineering Show episode, Hussein breaks down sync vs. async I/O, the Postgres 17 approach, the unique challenges of Async I/O in v18, and how each io_method (worker, io_uring, sync) actually performs. He also teases upcoming improvements—backend writer support, worker refinements, direct I/O—and confirms this feature set is just getting started.

Watch on YouTube