[jack_squat]

I've done the Postgres skip locked thing at least three times and I'm currently doing it, but IMO it is actually more maintenance and overhead, not less -- at least when compared with the queues made available by the major cloud providers. Compared with Pubsub or SQS you need to handle,

* Metrics, monitoring, alarming on depth, message age

* Autoscaling on your custom metrics

* Managing retries, dead lettering, backoff

* Managing the DB workload: it's update-heavy and may easily be more intensive than the rest of your app. You may need to repeatedly scale your tiny, startup-scale DB, causing customer disruptions, because of your homemade queue.

The arguments for it are either avoidance of lock-in, or the hand-wavy one in this article/many comments: "we're a small startup, we need to minimize complexity, and make things as simple as possible, maintenance will kill us!".

Lock-in makes sense (though other queue alternatives should still be considered), but the latter argument gets used to justify all kinds of harebrained, superficially-simple but actually-complicated engineering schemes. I generally put the PG skip locked approach in that bucket, particularly when the alternative on hand is Pubsub or SQS. If it's between a Postgres table and ActiveMQ I might feel more conflicted.

[5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV]

That's what Temporal is for