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by tatersolid 1392 days ago
You probably don’t need a separate message queue service if you have a transactional (probably “real SQL”) database. The “table as queue” pattern in SQL has been used since the 1970s at massive scale and was taught in my CSE 100-level classes back in the 1990s. The natural API for such a thing is basically the same as Rabbit/Kafka//SQS/whatever.
3 comments

The ”massive scale” of the 1970s is very far from today’s ”ordinary scale”! Just saying that this approach really does not scale well and problems will start around high hundreds of thousands to low millions of messages queued.
i agree with you if you have a transactional SQL it’s usually best to stick to this until it doesn’t scale.

it allows you to make the « add message to queue » part of a transaction that update other table which is nice!

do you have any pointers? Just curious how this is taught in the old days