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

TL;DR

Postgres 18 just dropped with a bunch of goodies—think UUIDv7, an Over-Explain module, composite index skip scans and, the star of the show, asynchronous I/O. In this episode we break down sync vs async calls, recap how Postgres 17 handled I/O, then dive into the new async methods: the worker model, the high-performance io_uring path and how you can still fall back to sync mode.

We also chat about the engineering hurdles the team faced, upcoming work on backend writers and direct I/O support, and why this is only the beginning of Postgres’s async journey.

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