Hussein Nasser: Asynchronous IO in Postgres 18 | The Backend Engineering Show

TL;DR

Postgres 18 is here with a batch of cool upgrades—think UUIDv7, an over-explain module for richer query insights, composite index skip scans, and the biggie: true async I/O support. Hussein walks you through the basics of sync vs async calls, revisits how PG 17 did I/O, and then unpacks Postgres 18’s new io_method options: spicy worker-thread I/O, lightning-fast io_uring, and a fallback sync mode.

He also teases what’s next—better backend writer support, direct I/O, and more performance tweaks—so you can crank up your database engine to eleven. Catch all the timestamped breakdowns and wrap-up in the video!

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