We’re now in the “feature freeze” phase of Postgres 18 development. That means no new features will get in - only bugfixes and cleanups of already committed changes. The goal is to test and stabilize the code before a release. PG 18 beta1 was released a couple days ago, so it’s a perfect time to do some testing and benchmarking.
One of the fundamental changes in PG 18 is going to be support for asynchronous I/O. And with beta1 out, it’s the right time to run your tests and benchmarks to test this new feature. Both for correctness and regression.
Last week I visited the Malmö PUG to talk about performance cliffs. It’s a really nice meetup - cozy environment, curious audience asking insightful questions. I highly recommend attending or even giving a talk there.
After the meetup I realized it’s been a while since I posted about some patch idea, and the performance cliff talk has a couple good candidates. Some might be a bit too hard for the first patch, for example improving the JIT costing. But improving the very first example about queries with IN clauses seems feasible. It’s quite well defined and isolated.
It’s been a couple weeks since P2D2 (Prague PostgreSQL Developer Day) 2025. We’ve been busy with the various tiny tasks that need to happen after the conference - processing feedback, paying invoices, and so on. But it’s also a good opportunity to look back - I realized this was the 15th year of the event I’ve helped to organize, so let me share some of that experience.
A couple days ago I wrote about performance improvements on OLTP workloads since Postgres 8.0, released 20 years ago. And I promised to share a similar analysis about analytical workloads in a follow-up post. So here we go ;-) Let me show you some numbers from a TPC-H benchmark, with some basic commentary and thoughts about the future.
The Postgres open source project is nearly 30 years old, I personally started using it about 20 years ago. And I’ve been contributing code for at least 10 years. But even with all that experience I find it really difficult to make judgments about how the performance changed over the years. Did it improve? And by how much? I decided to do some benchmarks to answer this question.
