PostgreSQL 17 vs 18: Side‑by‑Side Performance Wins in Real‑World Queries | POSETTE 2026
PostgreSQL 18's planner optimizations (OR-to-ANY rewrite, B-tree skip scan) deliver large real-world query speedups over 17.
“it's like, 1,741 times faster, like 99.9% reduction in execution time”
A Microsoft Postgres team engineer benchmarks PostgreSQL 18 against 17 on real-world query patterns, showing automatic planner gains like OR-to-ANY index rewrites (43% faster) and B-tree skip scans on low-cardinality leading columns (up to 1,741x faster). It's a useful database engineering insight but largely off-topic for AI industry signal.