Postgres Weekly Issue 617: September 25, 2025

#617 — September 25, 2025

Together with

Postgres 18 Released — Right on schedule comes the latest major version of Postgres. It's not one of Postgres's biggest steps forward, but has many notable changes to boost the performance of your database. Some of what’s new:

The introduction of an asynchronous I/O subsystem, allowing for more efficient scans, vacuuming, and more.
UUIDv7 support, along with several other new functions.
UPDATE ... RETURNING gets a notable improvement.
Parallel apply of large transactions.
OAuth 2.0 authorization and authentication.

💡 If you want the complete list of everything's that new, the release notes provide a thorough bulletpoint walkthrough.

The First Newsletter Dedicated to Product Engineers — Product for Engineers is PostHog’s newsletter dedicated to helping engineers get better at product. It includes what they’ve learned from building PostHog, research into top startups, and curated advice on building great products.

PostHog sponsor

PlanetScale for Postgres is Now GA — Back in July, PlanetScale, a cloud database platform best known for its MySQL services, announced it would be moving into the PG space, sharing a variety of benchmarks of how their solution stood against the rest. In ‘private preview’ till now, the service is now open to all.

Sam Lambert

💡 It's noteworthy how positive the comments on Hacker News were about this news, with numerous early users complimenting the service.

IN BRIEF:

Elizabeth Christensen looks at the original 1986 paper defining Postgres' design goals and concludes that 'the PostgreSQL creators totally nailed it.'
The IEEE has released a list of the top programming languages in 2025 and SQL comes in at number four.
Ben Dicken has put together a visual explainer of processes and threads which results in a comparison of Postgres and MySQL's approaches.
Red Gate is running its latest State of the Database Landscape survey. There's more info here.

Tuning Asynchronous I/O (AIO) in Postgres 18 — One of Postgres 18’s most striking changes is the introduction of asynchronous I/O (a.k.a. AIO – which you can learn more about here). Tomas looks at the new config settings introduced to affect how AIO works and scales.

Tomas Vondra

📄 Redis is Fast - I'll Cache in Postgres – A comparison of using Postgres vs Redis for basic caching tasks. Redis is faster, but not necessarily faster enough to justify running a second system, depending on your setup. Viktoras Kuznecovas

📄 Writing Nothing But Docs for a Week – The creator of the PgDog Postgres connection pooler and sharder has really gone to the docs. Lev Kokotov

📄 Postgres Partitioning Best Practices: Sofia's Story Karen Jex

📄 Understanding WAL and Optimizing It with a Dedicated Disk Warda Bibi

RELEASES:

pgschema: Declarative Schema Migrations for Postgres — Imagine something like Terraform but for bringing a declarative schema migration workflow to Postgres. There’s a lot on offer here and support for many advanced features – GitHub repo.

Tianzhou et al.

pgAudit 18.0: An Audit Logging Extension — Postgres 18 support comes to this extension for producing audit logs such as may be required to comply with government, financial, or ISO certifications.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

pgexporter 0.7: Prometheus Exporter for Postgres — Now with improvements to the core metrics, including new metrics for autovacuum, and new support for several extensions including PostGIS, pg_stat_statements, pgvector, and Timescale. Homepage.

pgexporter community

DoltgreSQL 0.52 – Version controlled Postgres-a-like with Git-like functionality.
BemiDB 1.6 – Single binary Postgres read replica optimized for analytics.
pgFormatter 5.8 – SQL code formatter and beautifier.
pgenv 1.4.3 – Postgres binary manager.