PostgreSQL 18 released

Version18 of the PostgreSQL database has been released. Notableimprovements in this release include "skip scan" lookups formulticolumn B-tree indexes, virtualgenerated columns, better text processing, oauthauthentication, and a new asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem to improveperformance:

AIO lets PostgreSQL issue multiple I/O requests concurrently insteadof waiting for each to finish in sequence. This expands existingreadahead and improves overall throughput. AIO operations supported inPostgreSQL 18 include sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, andvacuum. Benchmarking has demonstrated performance gains of up to 3x incertain scenarios.

There are, of course, many other improvements and changes; see thereleasenotes for full details.