21–30 of 97 posts
Kafka? No one wants to operate Kafka, if it's a serious contender it's because you need things only it can do. Same with Elasticsearch, it sucks to operate, sucks to build a second stack just for search, so you'd only consider it at the point that Postgres is no longer suitable. Same with Snowflake.
Like any tool, it works until it doesn't. And when it doesn't it takes a herculean effort to unwind it.
I looked at the first entry and yeah, just say no to moving your business logic into your database. Because change happens...and don't you want that happening in something more plastic than your RDBMS? But it's a great way to bind your solution to Postgres forever.
As an aside, I've used oracle, sybase, informix, mysql, postgresql, rdb, db2, mssql, and a few more that I can't remember. And the idea that pgsql is always the answer is the wrong answer to probably the wrong question.
I love Postgres. I buy using it for many many things. I really don’t understand why everyone insists that you should use it as a work/message queue. There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS). Your queue is likely to have very different access patterns than the rest of your data, and sticking it in Postgres means you’re probably going to end…
Because in 99% of cases you don't need a purpose built solution (Even if engineers often think that) at the scale that most people operate in. Nothing is easier to setup and administer than the database you already use.
We are using Postgres as a worker queue in production for many years, with millions of items being processed at any time and it's been perfectly fine. If you have hundreds like in your example...might as well use sqlite.
There's great projects like https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque and https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/4/absurd-in-production/ that give you even some tooling around that.
Lots of the alternatives that this site claims Postgres will do are things you'd only consider well past the point that Postgres would be viable. Kafka? No one wants to operate Kafka, if it's a serious contender it's because you need things only it can do. Same with Elasticsearch, it sucks to operate, sucks to build a second stack just for search, so you'd only consider it at the point that Postgres is no longer suit…
People reach for the things you mentioned wayyyyyy before they should.
Just because you want something queue shaped or search, doesn't mean you should reach for the big, specialized, expensive technology, when Postgres can already support it in your existing infrastructure up until some significant scale you often won't surpass.
I love Postgres. I buy using it for many many things. I really don’t understand why everyone insists that you should use it as a work/message queue. There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS). Your queue is likely to have very different access patterns than the rest of your data, and sticking it in Postgres means you’re probably going to end…
Using Postgres gives you transactions and consistency if you have to restore from a backup. Most of the time this doesn't matter (and is a liability) and you can just use some external queue system but sometimes it does matter.
I love Postgres. I buy using it for many many things. I really don’t understand why everyone insists that you should use it as a work/message queue. There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS). Your queue is likely to have very different access patterns than the rest of your data, and sticking it in Postgres means you’re probably going to end…
PostgreSQL is good enough until it's not good enough, when you realize all the bad design decisions that were made before it hits scale. It is the decisions people make around not partitioning, HA, replication that makes it not good enough.