TL;DR

Asynchronous IO finally lands in Postgres 18, alongside goodies like UUIDv7 and composite index skip scans. In this episode of The Backend Engineering Show, Hussein breaks down the difference between sync vs async calls, revisits Postgres 17’s synchronous IO, and dives into the new io_method options: worker threads and Linux’s io_uring.

He also covers the hurdles of baking async IO into Postgres’s backend, teases upcoming improvements (think backend writer support and direct IO), and wraps up with tips on tuning your setup for peak disk performance.

Watch on YouTube