Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18 | The Backend Engineering Show

Postgres 18 just landed with a bunch of goodies—UUIDv7, an overhauled explain module, composite index skip scans, and the headline feature: asynchronous IO. Hussein kicks things off by contrasting sync and async calls, revisiting how Postgres 17 did everything in lock-step, then dives into Postgres 18’s new async modes: worker threads, io_uring, and the good-old sync fallback when you need it.

Along the way he tackles the tech challenges of adding async IO to Postgres, teases future improvements like backend writer support and direct IO, and explains why this overhaul is a game-changer for database performance.

Watch on YouTube