[briHass]

I mostly agree, but from a devil's advocate position, the downside is the likelihood that you end up reimplementing queue basics like retries, delay/scheduling, and of course, the essential transactional state flips without locking or perf issues.

In my experience, the downside to the queue is losing all the historical statistics/state that you get for free with a database table. You have to instrument all that stuff manually, since most simple queues are designed to be transient once messages are confirmed.

I usually end up with a hybrid: store a copy of the state in the DB (along with all the job data), and essentially use the queue to hand off an ID or something pointing to the DB. You can then run queries against the best-effort state recorded in the DB, but the queue handles all the at-most and schedule/retry logic I don't want to handcraft.