September 25, 2025: PostgreSQL 18 Released!
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PostgreSQL 18 Press Kit

Contents

Original Press Release

PostgreSQL 18 Released!

September 25, 2025 - The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 18, the latest version of the world's most advanced open source database.

PostgreSQL 18 improves performance for workloads of all sizes through a new I/O subsystem that has demonstrated up to 3× performance improvements when reading from storage, and also increases the number of queries that can use indexes. This release makes major-version upgrades less disruptive, accelerating upgrade times and reducing the time required to reach expected performance after an upgrade completes. Developers also benefit from PostgreSQL 18 features, including virtual generated columns that compute values at query time, and the database-friendly uuidv7() function that provides better indexing and read performance for UUIDs. PostgreSQL 18 makes it easier to integrate with single-sign on (SSO) systems with support for OAuth 2.0 authentication.

"The efforts of the global open source community shape every PostgreSQL release and help deliver features that meet users where their data resides," said Jonathan Katz, a member of the PostgreSQL core team. "PostgreSQL 18 builds on the project's long, rich history of delivering a reliable and robust data management experience, while continuing to expand the workloads it can support."

PostgreSQL, an innovative data management system known for its reliability, robustness, and extensibility, benefits from nearly 30 years of open source development from a global developer community and has become the preferred open source relational database for organizations of all sizes.

Introducing asynchronous I/O

PostgreSQL previously relied on operating system readahead mechanisms to accelerate data retrieval. However, because operating systems lack insight into database-specific access patterns, they cannot always anticipate what data will be required, leading to suboptimal performance in many workloads.

PostgreSQL 18 introduces a new asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem designed to address this limitation. AIO lets PostgreSQL issue multiple I/O requests concurrently instead of waiting for each to finish in sequence. This expands existing readahead and improves overall throughput. AIO operations supported in PostgreSQL 18 include sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and vacuum. Benchmarking has demonstrated performance gains of up to 3x in certain scenarios.

The new io_method setting lets you toggle between the AIO methods, including worker and io_uring, or you can choose to maintain the current PostgreSQL behavior with the sync setting. There are now more parameters to consider tuning with AIO, which you can learn more about in the documentation.

Faster upgrades, better post-upgrade performance

A key PostgreSQL feature is the generation and storage of statistics that help PostgreSQL select the most efficient query plan. Before PostgreSQL 18, these statistics didn't carry over on a major version upgrade, which could cause significant query performance degradations on busy systems until the ANALYZE finished running. PostgreSQL 18 introduces the ability to keep planner statistics through a major version upgrade, which helps an upgraded cluster reach expected performance more quickly after the upgrade.

Additionally, pg_upgrade, a utility that performs major version upgrades, includes several enhancements in PostgreSQL 18, such as faster upgrades when a database contains many objects like tables and sequences. This release also lets pg_upgrade process its checks in parallel based on the settings of the --jobs flag, and adds the --swap flag that swaps upgrade directories instead of copying, cloning, or linking files.

Query and general performance enhancements

PostgreSQL 18 further accelerates query performance with features that automatically make your workloads faster. This release introduces "skip scan" lookups on multicolumn B-tree indexes that improve execution time for queries that omit an = condition on one or more prefix index columns. It can also optimize queries that use OR conditions in a WHERE to use an index, leading to significantly faster execution. There are also numerous improvements for how PostgreSQL plans and executes table joins, from boosting the performance of hash joins to allowing merge joins to use incremental sorts. PostgreSQL 18 also supports parallel builds for GIN indexes, joining B-tree and BRIN indexes in supporting this capability.

This release also builds on PostgreSQL support for hardware acceleration, including support for ARM NEON and SVE CPU intrinsics for the popcount function, which is used by the bit_count and other internal capabilities.

Enhancing the developer experience

PostgreSQL 18 introduces virtual generated columns that compute values at query time instead of storing them. This is now the default option for generated columns. Additionally, stored generated columns can now be logically replicated.

This release adds the capability to access both the previous (OLD) and current (NEW) values in the RETURNING clause for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE commands. PostgreSQL 18 also adds UUIDv7 generation through the uuidv7() function, letting you generate random UUIDs that are timestamp-ordered to support better caching strategies. PostgreSQL 18 includes uuidv4() as an alias for gen_random_uuid().

PostgreSQL 18 adds temporal constraints -- constraints over ranges -- for both PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints using the WITHOUT OVERLAPS clause, and on FOREIGN KEY constraints using the PERIOD clause.

Finally, PostgreSQL 18 makes it easier to create the schema definition of a foreign table using the definition of a local table with the CREATE FOREIGN TABLE ... LIKE command.

Improved text processing

PostgreSQL 18 makes text processing easier and faster with several new enhancements. This release adds the PG_UNICODE_FAST collation, which provides full Unicode semantics for case transformations while helping to accelerate many comparisons. This includes the upper and lower string comparison functions and the new casefold function for case-insensitive comparisons. Additionally, PostgreSQL 18 now supports making LIKE comparisons over text that uses a nondeterministic collation, simplifying how you can perform more complex pattern matching. This release also changes full text search to use the default collation provider of a cluster instead of always using libc, which may require you to reindex all full text search and pg_trgm indexes after running pg_upgrade.

Authentication and security features

PostgreSQL 18 introduces oauth authentication, which lets users authenticate using OAuth 2.0 mechanisms supported through PostgreSQL extensions. Additionally, PostgreSQL 18 includes validation for FIPS mode, and adds the ssl_tls13_ciphers parameter for configuring server-side TLS v1.3 cipher suites.

This release deprecates md5 password authentication, which will be removed in a future release. If you require PostgreSQL password-based authentication, use SCRAM authentication. PostgreSQL 18 also supports SCRAM passthrough authentication with both postgres_fdw and dblink for authenticating to remote PostgreSQL instances. Additionally, pgcrypto now supports SHA-2 encryption for password hashing.

Replication

PostgreSQL 18 supports reporting logical replication write conflicts in logs and in the pg_stat_subscription_stats view. Additionally, CREATE SUBSCRIPTION now defaults to using parallel streaming for applying transactions, which can help improve performance. The pg_createsubscriber utility now has an --all flag so you can create logical replicas for all databases in an instance with a single command. PostgreSQL 18 also lets you automatically drop idle replication slots to help prevent storing too many write-ahead log files on a publisher.

Maintenance and observability

PostgreSQL 18 improves its vacuum strategy by proactively freezing more pages during regular vacuums, reducing overhead and helping in situations that require aggressive vacuums.

PostgreSQL 18 adds more details to EXPLAIN, which provides information about query plan execution, and as of this release now automatically shows how many buffers (the fundamental unit of data storage) are accessed when executing EXPLAIN ANALYZE. Additionally, EXPLAIN ANALYZE now shows how many index lookups occur during an index scan, and EXPLAIN ANALYZE VERBOSE includes CPU, WAL, and average read statistics. PostgreSQL 18 includes more info in pg_stat_all_tables on time spent on vacuum and related operations, as well as per-connection statistics on I/O and WAL utilization.

Other notable changes

Databases initialized with PostgreSQL 18 initdb now have page checksums enabled by default. This can affect upgrades from non-checksum enabled clusters, which would require you to create a new PostgreSQL 18 cluster with the --no-data-checksums option when using pg_upgrade.

PostgreSQL 18 also introduces a new version (3.2) of the PostgreSQL wire protocol, the first new protocol version since PostgreSQL 7.4 (2003). libpq still uses version 3.0 by default while clients (e.g., drivers, poolers, proxies) add support for the new protocol version.

Additional Features

Many other new features and improvements have been added to PostgreSQL 18 that may also be helpful for your use cases. Please see the release notes for a complete list of new and changed features.

About PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database, with a global community of thousands of users, contributors, companies and organizations. Since its beginnings at the University of California, Berkeley over 40 years ago, PostgreSQL has continued with an unmatched pace of development. PostgreSQL's mature feature set not only matches top proprietary database systems, but exceeds them in advanced database features, extensibility, security, and stability.

About PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is the world's most advanced open source database, with a global community of thousands of users, contributors, companies and organizations. Built on over 35 years of engineering, starting at the University of California, Berkeley, PostgreSQL has continued with an unmatched pace of development. PostgreSQL's mature feature set not only matches top proprietary database systems, but exceeds them in advanced database features, extensibility, security, and stability.

Learn more about PostgreSQL and participate in our community at PostgreSQL.org.

More About the Features

For explanations of the above features and others, please see the following resources:

Where to Download

There are several ways you can download PostgreSQL 18, including:

Other tools and extensions are available on the PostgreSQL Extension Network.

Documentation

PostgreSQL 18 comes with HTML documentation HTML documentation as well as man pages, and you can also browse the documentation online in both HTML and PDF formats.

Licence

PostgreSQL uses the PostgreSQL License, a BSD-like "permissive" license. This OSI-certified license is widely appreciated as flexible and business-friendly, since it does not restrict the use of PostgreSQL with commercial and proprietary applications. Together with multi-company support and public ownership of the code, our license makes PostgreSQL very popular with vendors wanting to embed a database in their own products without fear of fees, vendor lock-in, or changes in licensing terms.

Contacts

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Postgres and PostgreSQL and the Elephant Logo (Slonik) are all registered trademarks of the PostgreSQL Community Association. If you wish to use these marks, you must comply with the trademark policy.

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Corporate Support and Donations

PostgreSQL enjoys the support of numerous companies, who sponsor developers, provide hosting resources, and give us financial support. See our sponsors page for some of these project supporters.

There is also a large community of companies offering PostgreSQL Support, from individual consultants to multinational companies.

If you wish to make a financial contribution to the PostgreSQL Global Development Group or one of the recognized community non-profit organizations, please visit our donations page.