PostgreSQL 18 released

Version
18 of the PostgreSQL database has been released. Notable
improvements in this release include "skip scan" lookups for
multicolumn B-tree indexes, virtual
generated columns, better text processing, oauth
authentication, and a new asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem to improve
performance:

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.

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