Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18

Postgres 18 brings a ton of goodies—think native UUIDv7, an “over explain” module and composite-index skip scans—but the real star is its new async I/O support. Hussein digs into the nuts and bolts: how synchronous calls differ from asynchronous ones, what Postgres 17’s I/O looked like, and why async I/O was such a beast to tame in v18.

He then walks through the three io_method options—worker threads, io_uring and the classic sync path—along with plans for backend-writer support, direct I/O and more tweaks. If you care about squeezing every last drop of I/O performance from your database, this episode is your new best friend.

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