PG18 Hacktober: 31 Days of New Features : Wrap Up with Our Top picks,Community shout-outs & Postgres gratitude

PG18 Hacktober D-Day: Wrap Up with Our Top picks, Community shout-outs & Postgres gratitude.

What a Month!
Over the last 31 days, we’ve explored the depth, power, and beauty of PostgreSQL 18, one feature (or a part of) at a time.

From performance wins and observability tools to security upgrades and SQL standard enhancements, PG18 shows us why PostgreSQL continues to be the world’s most advanced open source database.

Let’s close this series by celebrating:

Our Top 5 favorite features
The PostgreSQL contributors who made it happen
And a community that keeps Postgres thriving

PG18 Hacktober Top 5: Our favorite features

Here are 5 features that received the loudest applause from readers, developers, and contributors during the series, presented as shout-outs:

Asynchronous I/O in PostgreSQL 18 (Read our Part1 & Part2 on AIO)
OAuth Authorization/Authentication (Read our Part1 & Part2 on OAuth)
UUIDv7: Identifiers for Modern Systems (Read our blog8 on UUID)
pg_upgrade enhancements (Read our blog1 & blog2 on pg_upgrade)
New contrib modules (Read our blog25 & blog26 on new contrib modules)

Shout-Out to the PostgreSQL Contributors

PostgreSQL 18 wouldn’t exist without the contributions of this incredible community of developers, reviewers, testers, and doc writers.

To the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, extension authors, release testers, and all the silent heroes of git.postgresql.org:
Thank you. Your commitment, rigor, and generosity inspire open-source communities everywhere.

Meet the PostgreSQL Contributors

PostgreSQL isn’t just powerful because of its code — it’s powerful because of its community. Over 500+ contributors — continuously shape what we proudly call the world’s most advanced open-source database.

Release Notes for PostgreSQL 18

PostgreSQL 18 contains many new features and enhancements, including:

An asynchronous I/O (AIO) A subsystem that can improve the performance of sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, vacuums, and other operations.
pg_upgrade now retains optimizer statistics.
Support for skip scan lookups that allow using multicolumn B-tree indexes in more cases.
uuidv7() function for generating timestamp-ordered UUIDs.
Virtual generated columns that compute their values during read operations. This is now the default for generated columns.
OAuth authentication support.
OLD and NEW support for RETURNING clauses in INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE commands.
Temporal constraints, or constraints over ranges, for PRIMARY KEY, UNIQUE, and FOREIGN KEY constraints.

The above and other new features of PostgreSQL 18 are explained in the PG18Hacktober blog post.

Here are the release notes for PostgreSQL 18

What made PG18 more special?

Developer-first features like CREATE FOREIGN TABLE ... LIKE, pg_logicalinspect and pg_overexplain
Performance & observability with pg_stat_io,pg_stat_wal and AIO
Security-first upgrades like FIPS mode, TLS 1.3 cipher tuning, and hashed passwords with SHA-2
Internationalization wins with ICU, LIKE for nondeterministic collations and pg_unicode_fast

All packed into one major release.

A Creative Touch: PG18 by the Numbers

31 Blog Posts
20+ Features Explored
10+ Extensions Demo’ed
100s of queries explained
1 Vibrant community

What’s Next?

This isn’t the end. It’s a new beginning.
PostgreSQL 18 is now GA, and adoption starts now. Whether you’re:

Migrating
Upgrading
Designing your next-gen stack with PG18.

We hope this series becomes your go-to launchpad.

Download PostgreSQL 18 at https://postgresql.org/download

Catch up on all PG18 Hacktober posts: https://opensource-db.com/category/pg18-hacktober/

Final Words: From Us to You

Thank you for joining us on this journey. Whether you read one post or all 31, this series was for you, the engineers, architects, students, and community members who believe in the future of PostgreSQL.

We’ll keep building. Keep sharing.
And keep celebrating this amazing elephant we all love.

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to AWS, Aiven, EDB, CYBERTEC, pgEdge, Microsoft, PostgresPro, Google, PGX, Fujitsu, Tiger Data, NTT Data, Neon, Supabase, and many others for their invaluable support and contributions to the PostgreSQL 18 release and the wider community.

References

Huge thanks and kudos to all the blogging experts for the knowledge dump of the PostgreSQL 18 major features. We couldn’t have done without the additional tidbits from these evangelists.

PostgreSQL Feature Matrix
Neon PG18 blogs
CYBERTEC PG18 Upgrade blog
Auth0 OAuth blog
Vondra AIO blog
w3 casefold blog
pgpedia casefold blog
PostgresPro PG18 blogs
Database Rookies PG18 blog