PostgreSQL 18 Beta RC1 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 18 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the pre-release of PostgreSQL 18 on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. You can deploy PostgreSQL 18 RC1 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment that has the benefits of a fully managed database.

PostgreSQL 18 includes "skip scan" support for multicolumn B-tree indexes and improves WHERE clause handling for OR and IN conditions. It introduces parallel GIN (Generalized Inverted) Index builds and updates join operations. Observability improvements show buffer usage counts and index lookups during query execution, along with per-connection I/O utilization metric. Please refer 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.