After a year of development, the new stable branch of the DBMS PostgreSQL 18 has been released. Updates for the new branch will be available for the next five years until November 2030. Support for PostgreSQL 13.X, the oldest supported branch, will be discontinued on November 13.
The main innovations include:
- Added asynchronous input/output subsystem, allowing for increased input/output capacity and eliminating delays. The new implementation based on io_uring (Io_Method = IO_URING) from the Linux 5.1 kernel provides asynchronous input/output to speed up operations such as reading data from the file system. Performance tests have shown a 2-3 times increase in performance.
- Implemented Skip Scan optimization in multi-column indices, allowing for the use of index columns separately. This optimization improves efficiency for requests containing “OR” and “IN (…)” structures in the “WHERE” block.
- Added optimization for more efficient index usage in requests containing “OR” and “IN (…)” structures in the “WHERE” block, as well as improving the planning and execution of table unions. The update also includes the use of gin (Generalized Inverted Index) for indexing composite values like arrays and full-text data.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.