Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18

Hussein Nasser dives into the brand-new Postgres 18, unveiling its star feature: true asynchronous I/O. After a quick refresher on sync vs. async calls and a look at Postgres 17’s sync I/O, he shows how Postgres 18 tackles I/O with two modes—worker and io_uring—while still offering a fallback sync mode. Along the way you’ll get timestamps for each deep-dive (from fundamental I/O concepts to implementation challenges) and learn what still lies ahead: better backend-writer support, direct I/O, and more.

Plus, you’ll catch highlights of other exciting Postgres 18 goodies—UUIDv7, the “Over explain” module, composite index skip scans—and a quick wrap-up of resources like database and backend engineering courses, podcasts, and more from Hussein’s ecosystem.

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