Postgres Weekly Issue 599: May 8, 2025

#599 — May 8, 2025

Together with

The Draft Release Notes for Postgres 18 — Bruce Momjian has just completed his first draft of the Postgres 18 release notes in time for Beta 1. The final release is expected in September or October.

Bruce Momjian et al.

Postgres 18 Beta 1 Released — The first official look at Postgres 18 has just landed in the past few hours. The release notes paint the big picture, but PG18 is shaping up to be a solid release with faster scans and vacuuming on Linux, parallel GIN builds, virtual generated columns, OAuth support, enhanced EXPLAIN ANALYZE output and more. It's time to go and play.

Jonathan Katz et al.

📢 Postgres 17.5, 16.9, 15.13, 14.18, and 13.21 have also been released.

[New from O’Reilly] The 2nd Edition of CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide — Learn how to build resilient, scalable apps with a Postgres-compatible distributed SQL database. Same Postgres feel—familiar tools, schema, and queries—built to scale globally, on premise or in any cloud, with native geo-data placement and low TCO.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O in Postgres 18 — The first beta release of Postgres 18 adds limited asynchronous I/O (AIO) support – something that’s been years in the making. This post explains what it is, how it works, and what it means for performance optimization.

Lukas Fittl

IN BRIEF:

Microsoft's Claire Giordano has published a rather epic writeup of Microsoft's work on Postgres over the past year — whether on its own services like Azure Database for PostgreSQL or in terms of its contributions to the core Postgres project.
🇺🇸 PGConf NYC 2025 takes place this September in New York City. If you want to speak, you have till May 25 to submit a proposal.
🇨🇭 Swiss PGDay 2025 takes place on June 26-27 and the schedule has just been published.
Timescale announces pgai Vectorizer is now compatible with any Postgres setup.
Koyeb has announced its Koyeb Serverless Postgres platform is now GA.

📄 Another Look into CTE Materialization and Non-Idempotent Subqueries Shayon Mukherjee

📊 PgDog vs. PgBouncer By the Numbers – Three scaling options go head to head. Lev Kokotov

📄 Migrating from Postgres to MongoDB in a .NET EF Core App – Not the direction I’d be heading, but if you need to do it.. Luce Carter

📄 Jacob Champion Becomes a Postgres Committer Caroline Pickens (EDB)

📄 Which LLM Writes the Best Analytical SQL? Ramirez and Romeu (Tinybird)

QUICK RELEASES:

Announcing pg_parquet v.0.4.0 — pg_parquet provides a way to export and import Parquet files directly within Postgres, without relying on third-party tools.

Aykut Bozkurt (Crunchy Data)

external_file 1.2 – An extension to allow access to external files from Postgres server file systems.
csv-to-sql-insert – A tool that takes a CSV file and turns it into an SQL INSERT statement.
River 0.21 – Robust job processing system for Go and Postgres.
pg_timetable 5.13 – Advanced scheduling extension.