Posts about Postgres 18

  • 2 min read

    Postgres 18: OLD and NEW Rows in the RETURNING Clause

    Brandur Leach

    Postgres 18 was released today . Well down page from headline features like async I/O and UUIDv7 support, we get this nice little improvement: 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. It's not a showstopper the way async I/O is, but it is one of those small features that's invaluable in the right situation. A simple demonstration with to get all old and new values: Say w...

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  • 9 min read

    Postgres’ Original Project Goals: The Creators Totally Nailed It

    Elizabeth Christensen

    I had a chance last week to sit down and read the original academic paper announcing Postgres as a platform and the original design goals from 1986. I was just awestruck at the forethought - and how the original project goals laid the foundation for the database that seems to be taking over the world right now. The PostgreSQL creators totally nailed it. They laid out a flexible framework for a variety of business use cases that would eventually become the most popular database 30 years later....

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  • 7 min read

    Get Excited About Postgres 18

    Elizabeth ChristensenDavid Christensen

    Postgres 18 will be released in just a couple weeks! Here’s some details on the most important and exciting features. Postgres 18 is adding asynchronous i/o. This means faster reads for many use cases. This is also part of a bigger series of performance improvements planned for future Postgres, part of which may be multi-threading. Expect to see more on this in coming versions. What is async I/O? When data isn’t in the shared memory buffers already, Postgres reads from disk, and I/O is needed...

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