PostgreSQL 18.0 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 18.0 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the latest PostgreSQL features while leveraging the benefits of a fully managed database service. This preview environment provides you a sandbox where you can test applications and explore new PostgreSQL 18.0 capabilities before they become generally available.

PostgreSQL 18.0 includes "skip scan" support for multicolumn B-tree indexes and improves WHERE clause handling for OR and IN conditions. It introduces parallel Generalized Inverted Index (GIN) builds and updates join operations. It now supports Universally Unique Identifiers Version 7 (UUIDv7), which combines timestamp-based ordering with traditional UUID uniqueness to boost performance in high-throughput distributed systems. Observability improvements show buffer usage counts and index lookups during query execution, along with per-connection I/O utilization metric. Please refer to the RDS PostgreSQL release documentation for more details.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots that are created in the preview environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the preview environment. You can use the PostgreSQL dump and load functionality to import or export your databases from the preview environment.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced as per the pricing in the US East (Ohio) Region.