Postgres 18 Beta 1 has been released, introducing several significant features. The new asynchronous I/O subsystem allows for parallel reads and reduces CPU wait time, improving throughput. Operational teams can now retain planner statistics from the old cluster during upgrades, reducing degraded performance immediately after an upgrade. Postgres 18 also includes more detailed EXPLAIN output with runtime details such as buffer and I/O usage, index scan nodes, and WAL writes. Additionally, new statistics for vacuum and analyze are available, providing insights into total time spent on these operations. The release also introduces a new uuidv7() function to generate timestamp-sortable UUIDs, as well as improvements in performance, including parallelizable GIN index builds and skip scan support in btree indexes. Furthermore, Postgres 18 adds OAuth support for authentication using OAuth 2.0 tokens. With the final release expected to be available on Neon soon, users are encouraged to test against real workloads and provide feedback to help improve Postgres.