When an index is built in PostgreSQL, the database traditionally used one core to do the job. In many cases, this was not an issue. However, PostgreSQL is used for ever-growing systems and therefore index creation starts to be an issue in many cases. At the moment the community is trying to improve sorting as well. The first step is therefore to allow for the parallel creation of btrees, which has made it into PostgreSQL 11. Future versions of PostgreSQL will also allow provide parallel sorts for normal operations, which is unfortunately not yet supported by PostgreSQL 11.

Parallel index creation can speed up indexing dramatically and we are eager to see future improvements in this area (maybe support for other index types, and so on).