Today is a big day for the PostgreSQL community and we’re thrilled to congratulate everyone involved in the official release of Postgres 18. This release, with 25% more features and 5% more contributors than last year, is a testament to the power of open-source collaboration and the vibrant, innovative community that continues to make Postgres #1 most loved, used, and wanted database, according to developers.
As a dedicated contributor, EDB is proud to be part of this community and of the features we helped bring to life to benefit our customers and the community alike. Keep reading for a quick recap of our contributions and favorite features, and how they’ll help enterprises deploy Postgres for the next generation of data-driven applications.
Security for today’s integrated tech landscape
In today’s landscape, security is a requirement for every organization. Postgres 18 makes a major leap with the introduction of support for Open Authorization (OAuth). This is a huge win for enterprises that rely on centralized identity management systems like Okta, Keycloak, or Microsoft Entra. OAuth validators can be introduced as extensions, allowing Postgres to integrate into a corporation's existing identity infrastructure. To deep dive on this capability, check out this blog.
Postgres 18, like every major release, brings new security improvements. Support for OAuth, along with a set of other security enhancements, from libpq security updates to groundwork for encrypted column support, makes Postgres more robust and compliant than ever before. For us, supporting these features was critical in continuing to make Postgres secure and enterprise-ready, so our customers, even those in the most highly-regulated industries, can operate their favorite open source technology with confidence.
Jacob Champion, PostgreSQL major contributor and principal engineer at EDB, shares with Floor Drees, PostgreSQL community organizer and EDB principal program manager, the four-year journey to PostgreSQL 18’s new OAuth feature and how EDB embraces the community’s consensus-driven pace.
Innovation and developer productivity through extensibility
Postgres has always been known for its extensibility, but Postgres 18 takes this to a new level. We're especially excited about our contributions to these updates:
- Access Methods for New Index Types: This new capability opens the door for vector and analytics-focused index development. Why is this so important? Enabling innovation of new index types and advanced storage capabilities outside of the core Postgres codebase means we can continue to build and innovate with new data types and search capabilities without waiting for changes to be integrated into the core engine. This unlocks a new level of long-term flexibility and is critical for supporting the complex data structures needed for AI workloads.
- Dynamic Extension Loading: As more organizations embrace cloud-native and containerized environments, managing extensions becomes a pain point. Traditionally, PostgreSQL requires extensions to be installed in a system directory. However, this didn’t work for immutable setups like CloudNativePG, where the system directory is read-only for security. This form of static extension loading limits agility, scalability, and modular database management. Dynamic extension loading addresses this directly, providing greater flexibility and a more agile, efficient manageability. This new approach makes it easier to load and manage extensions in modern DevOps workflows and begins to bridge the gap between extending functionality and maintaining tight control of the database.
- Virtual Generated Columns: With virtual generated columns, developers can implement business logic directly in the database with less code. You can define computed fields that aren’t stored on disk—ideal for lightweight expressions and avoiding table bloat.
- Enhanced SQL Standards: Temporal foreign key constraints and [NOT] ENFORCED constraints expand SQL compliance and schema flexibility. New optimizations allow SELECT DISTINCT queries to internally reorder keys, avoiding unnecessary sorts and improving performance without code changes. Now, users don’t have to replicate code across multiple applications for a faster, more flexible experience.
Together, these enhancements make Postgres 18 a release that empowers developers to build more cleanly, efficiently, and with more expressive schemas for the future.
PostgreSQL community leaders Bruce Momjian, Tom Kincaid, and Floor Drees share how the database evolves every year, from the first idea on a mailing list to the final release.
EDB's commitment: Postgres for the AI Generation
Contributing to and supporting the Postgres community is a core of our mission at EDB. As Postgres evolves, so does our ability to deliver value through EDB Postgres AI (EDB PG AI), the industry’s first and only sovereign Postgres data and AI platform. By extending the power of Postgres, EDB PG AI can support both most demanding operational workloads and complex data initiatives including large scale data warehousing and analytics, globally distributed data architectures, and sophisticated AI pipelines. With EDB PG AI, customers have an all-in-one database for transactional, analytical, and AI workloads with always-on availability across any deployment environment—always secure by default and ready for mission-critical applications.
The Postgres 18 release is a powerful demonstration of the community's commitment to building the best open-source database in the world. As we celebrate this milestone, we're also hard at work on our own enterprise distribution of Postgres 18. This upcoming EDB PG AI Database release will include additional features to further enhance the security, extensibility, and AI-readiness that Postgres 18 brings to the table.
Stay tuned for more on that release! If you’re curious about these or other Postgres 18 features coming to EDB PG AI, contact us or learn more about EDB PG AI Database here.