Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Alright, settle down, whippersnappers. I was scrolling through the ol' ARPANET on my monochrome monitor and stumbled across this little announcement. Another "revolutionary" database version, another round of applause for features we had before most of you were born. It seems Postgres 18 is here to change the world. Again. Let's pour a cup of lukewarm coffee and see what all the fuss is about, shall we?
Oh, a new asynchronous I/O system! How completely and utterly groundbreaking. It's adorable, really. It reminds me of the time we implemented something similar on a System/370 mainframe to keep the batch jobs from taking all weekend. We didn't call it some fancy marketing term; we called it "writing competent JCL." It's not a feature, kids, it's just not writing your database engine to do one thing at a time like it's waiting in line at the DMV.
Then we have the breathless reveal of built-in UUIDv7. A time-ordered, sortable unique identifier! My goodness. Back in my day, we had sequence generators. If we needed it to be unique across two whole machines, we'd tack on a server ID. It took five minutes and a change to a COBOL copybook. We didn't need a committee and a version bump to figure out how to generate a number that gets bigger over time. I once generated globally unique IDs using a punch card machine and a very determined intern named Gary. It worked just fine.
I see they're mighty proud that "more queries can make use of multi-column indexes" thanks to a new Skip Scan optimization. Let me translate that for you from marketing-speak into English: "Our query planner is slightly less dumb than it was before." Getting your index to work as intended isn't an achievement you put in a press release. That's like a car company bragging that in their new model, the steering wheel is actually connected to the wheels. We expected that from DB2 in 1985.
But this... this is the real gem. This is the punchline that writes itself. For all this talk of cloud-native, serverless, automated synergy, here's how you get to this magical new version:
We don't currently offer an automated, in-place upgrade from Postgres 17 to 18. To upgrade, create a new Postgres 18 database and perform an online migration...
You have to manually migrate your own data. I'm having flashbacks to swapping 9-track tape reels for a weekend-long data center move in '92, only now you get to do it with more YAML and less job security. We had to do that because the new machine was physically across the state. What's their excuse? Did the new version get deployed to a different cloud? At least when my tape backups failed, I could blame a faulty read head or cosmic rays. This is just... progress.
So there you have it. Some old ideas polished up, a bug fix disguised as a feature, and a migration path that would've gotten a sysprog laughed out of the server room. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Now if you'll excuse me, I think I have a set of ISAM files that need reorganizing. At least that's honest work.