Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18 TL;DR

Postgres 18 just dropped with a host of neat upgrades—from native UUIDv7 and composite index skip-scans to an “Over” explain module—but the real headliner is its new async IO support. After laying out the differences between sync and async calls and revisiting how Postgres 17 handled IO, the episode dives into Postgres 18’s two modes (worker threads and Linux’s io_uring) as well as the fallback sync path.

Along the way you’ll hear about the engineering hurdles of adding async IO, what’s next (think backend writers and direct IO support), and why this isn’t the final chapter in Postgres’s IO saga.

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