#​618 — October 2, 2025

Web Version
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Postgres Weekly

Going Down the Rabbit Hole of Postgres 18 Features — Excuse us if we maintain the excitement from last week’s release of Postgres 18. Tudor walks through a variety of the exciting and useful new features in a way you might find more accessible than the lengthy release notes.

Tudor Golubenco (Xata)

💡 Tianzhou of Bytebase has a similar roundup in What's New in Postgres 18 – A Developer's Perspective. We also feature some more deep dives into specific Postgres 18 features later in this issue.

🚀 Scale Postgres to 2PB & Trillions of Metrics/Day — TigerData, creators of TimescaleDB, are pushing Postgres to new limits: scale to 2PB and 1.5 trillion metrics/day—without proprietary black boxes or hidden tools. With Tiger Postgres, you get massive scale while keeping the SQL you know and love.

TigerData sponsor

Pipelining Comes to psql in Postgres 18 — As of Postgres 18, psql comes equipped with commands to use pipelining in SQL scripts, something which Daniel notes “can provide huge gains in query throughput”.

Daniel Vérité

IN BRIEF:

How to Do UPDATE ... LIMIT — Sorry, you can’t use UPDATE (or DELETE for that matter) with LIMIT in Postgres (though some SQL dialects, like MySQL’s, support it) but there are alternative approaches you can (carefully) use.

Laurenz Albe

Postgres 18 and Beyond: From AIO to Direct IO? — One of Postgres 18’s most exciting features is its support for asynchronous IO but could we do even better with Direct IO and skipping OS caching entirely?

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

How I Learned to Use wal_inspect — pg_walinspect is a module for inspecting the contents of a write-ahead log.

Hettie Dombrovskaya

📄 Implementing a Kalman Filter in Postgres to Smooth GPS Data – Certainly something I’ve not seen done in SQL before. Thorsten Rieß

📄 Postgres 18: OLD and NEW Rows in the RETURNING Clause Brandur Leach

📄 How the COPY Command Gets More User Friendly in Postgres 18 Deepak Mahto

📄 Cumulative Statistics in Postgres 18 Cédric Villemain

RELEASES:

PG Back Web 0.5: A Postgres Backup System with Web Interface — A Go-powered app for bringing a bit more of a friendly user interface to Postgres backups, as well as scheduled backups (including to S3), backup monitoring, and webhooks. It’s available as a Docker image and now supports Postgres 18 too.

Luis Eduardo

Introducing Elephantshark: A Tool to Monitor Postgres Network Traffic — A Ruby-powered tool that sits between the two parties in a Postgres-protocol exchange, forwarding messages in both directions while parsing and logging them. GitHub repo.

George MacKerron (Neon)