Dimitri Fontaine’s review of PostgreSQL 11 through PostgreSQL 18 looks back at seven major yearly releases and narrows the focus to one area: SQL improvements. While every PostgreSQL version includes a wide range of work in performance, replication, administration and security, this selection centers on changes that application developers and database users notice directly in everyday SQL work.
The overview spans releases shipped from 2018 to 2025, a period in which PostgreSQL maintained its steady once-a-year cadence. Fontaine notes that each version arrived with a large list of user-visible updates, making it difficult to track everything at once. His personal selection is meant to pull out the SQL-related additions and refinements that best show how the database evolved over that stretch.
Rather than treating PostgreSQL only as an engine-level project, the piece emphasizes how new releases also expand the SQL experience itself. That includes the kind of changes that can affect how developers write queries, work with database features and take advantage of modern capabilities without needing to dig through hundreds of release-note entries.
For readers following PostgreSQL 11 to 18 SQL improvements, the article serves as a guided summary of progress across multiple versions instead of a full changelog. The main takeaway is that PostgreSQL’s yearly releases did not just add infrastructure and operational features; they also steadily improved the SQL surface used by developers and analysts.
