Postgres 18 Beta Is Out: 7 Features You Should Know About

PostgreSQL 18 Beta 1 introduces significant improvements including asynchronous I/O for better performance, enhanced pg_upgrade with statistics retention, detailed EXPLAIN output for observability, new vacuum/analyze statistics, UUIDv7 generation, performance optimizations like parallelizable GIN index builds, and OAuth authentication support. The async I/O feature offers three methods (sync, worker, io_uring) with early benchmarks showing 2-3x improvements on read-heavy queries.