A Postgres-focused newsletter episode covering several topics: a PlanetScale benchmark comparing Postgres 17 vs 18 across four storage types (EBS GP3, EBS with 10K IOPS, IO2, and local NVMe), showing NVMe's dramatic IOPS advantage (~300K vs ~16K) at similar cost (~$500/month). Postgres 18's async IO worker mode generally outperforms io_uring in these tests. Other topics include: the max_locks_per_transaction setting and its shared memory implications, performance impact of pg_blocking_pids observer effect (roughly 10% throughput hit), how prepared statements reduce lightweight lock overhead after the 6th execution, a PL/pgSQL function for sanitizing SQL in logs, PostGIS indexing with GiST for geometry queries (10x speedup), transparent data encryption (TDE) coming to Postgres 18 via Percona, and building RAG apps with pgvector. The consulting corner shares a case where upgrading to faster hardware triggered locking contention issues that never appeared on slower hardware, possibly due to race conditions becoming more likely at higher speeds.