Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Perhaps we were all just not good at database'ing, but at a previous job, "using RDBMS as a queue" became a meme/shorthand for "terrible idea that needs to be stamped out immediately".

Does Postgres have some features that make it not entirely unsuitable to use for queuing?



I think this is one of the cases where "You don't have Google problems, so you don't need Google solutions" applies. Using Postgres or a RDBMS for queuing is perfectly fine and it'll get you a long way before you have to worry about scaling or optimizing it.

The benefits are easy to see: You already know how to operate a database, you can easily see what's the in the queue, you can easily insert items in the queue with a simple "insert" query, you can use triggers to enqueue items that got changed etc.

In the end, a queue is relatively simple to switch out later.


For update skip locked




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: