The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has officially released Postgres 18, continuing the project’s nearly decade-long pattern of major updates in the September-October time frame. This consistency is one of many reasons Postgres remains the most loved, admired, and used database, according to more than 15,000 developers in the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.

Postgres 18 showcases the community’s ongoing growth with 110 unique contributors delivering 202 new features—a 25% increase in features and a 5% increase in contributors compared to last year’s release. After nearly 40 years, the project continues to innovate and meet the demands of the next wave of workloads across hybrid and distributed environments.

Here are some of the most impactful features of Postgres 18 that show why it’s the world’s most popular open-source database.

Asynchronous I/O: Faster operations and freer CPU cycles

A highly anticipated feature is the asynchronous I/O subsystem, which targets major performance constraints in any database: the wait for data to move between disk and memory.

This will significantly accelerate operations in Postgres, with blogs showing 2x to 3x improvements for some workloads. But raw speed is only part of the story. The value lies in freeing CPU cycles to handle parallel work while I/O operations complete. Being asynchronous means the database doesn’t have to pause while disk activity finishes. CPU resources remain free to process other tasks, so queries and background operations can advance in parallel, making the entire system more responsive and efficient. For developers and DBAs, this means:

• Faster query execution and responsiveness
• Better throughput for analytics and machine learning pipelines
• Greater hardware efficiency without changes to application code

This is a foundational upgrade for enterprises looking to support real-time decision-making and AI inference workloads. The initial focus of the new subsystem is on disk reads, but its use cases and optimizations are expected to grow to many different areas of Postgres in subsequent releases.

OAuth authentication and enhanced security: Better protection with less operational burden

The introduction of built-in OAuth authentication is a major win for enterprises that use a single-source identity system.

Modern enterprises rely on centralized identity systems like Okta, Keycloak, or LDAP to manage user access securely. Adding OAuth authentication makes it far easier to integrate with these platforms.

This capability reduces operational complexity by:

• Centralizing credential management
• Enabling scalable, role-based access control
• Strengthening security posture with standards-based authentication

Postgres 18 also includes additional security enhancements. This version deprecates MD5 and enables SCRAM authentication in new locations, including connections to other databases via foreign data wrappers, strengthening protection across distributed environments.

Advancing SQL standards: More flexibility for modern applications

Postgres 18 introduces new enhancements for NOT NULL constraints, foreign keys, and virtual generated columns, improving data integrity and giving developers more options when building applications that need to run across multiple database platforms. These updates make it easier to use Postgres as the foundation for standards-based applications—an important advantage for teams that want portability and long-term maintainability.

Optimizer improvements: Smarter query planning with less developer tuning

For many years, the Postgres query optimizer saw only modest changes, but recent releases have reversed that trend. In Postgres 18, developers will see:

• Faster execution for complex queries
• Lower memory consumption

The optimizer decides how a query will run by evaluating multiple execution paths and selecting the most efficient plan. Thanks to new contributions across the community, complex queries now execute faster and with lower memory consumption in Postgres 18, eliminating much of the manual tuning developers once had to perform.

These improvements make Postgres an even stronger choice for mixed transactional and analytical workloads, where query efficiency directly impacts performance at scale.

Ecosystem enablement: More flexibility for extensions and Kubernetes deployments

Postgres 18 introduces several new enablement features designed to help this broader ecosystem innovate more quickly.

Extensions can now be loaded from any user-specified directory, including network-mounted drives. This is a major win for the growing community running Postgres in Kubernetes. Kubernetes contributors worked alongside the Postgres development team to ensure a seamless experience, eliminating the need to rebuild operators every time a new extension is required; now an operator can simply retrieve the extension from a mounted storage volume.

This also helps third-party developers create new index types as extensions, a capability that not only encourages experimentation but also strengthens Postgres as a platform for advanced analytics and high-performance data applications.

Looking ahead

Postgres 18 is a feature-rich release, delivering a wide range of enhancements that lay important groundwork for future innovation. The momentum behind the Postgres 18 release also shows how the project’s global contributor base continues to grow, ensuring advancements in areas like analytics and developer tooling.

The takeaway: whether you’re modernizing core systems, building real-time analytics pipelines, or operationalizing AI, Postgres 18 gives you a faster, more secure, and more extensible foundation than ever.

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