Queues in PostgreSQL | Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2022

Video of a talk given by Thomas Munro at Citus Con: An Event for Postgres. Abstract: Many projects involve something resembling a job or message queue. Using a PostgreSQL database for this can be a reasonable choice in some cases. However, it’s not without complications. This talk in the APAC livestream at Citus Con looks at queue-like database workloads in detail. The topics covered include:

• defining and categorizing queue-like structures and access patterns
• reasons to consider building queues inside your relational database
• reasons to avoid building queues inside your relational database
• example use cases
• locking strategies and concurrency
• higher transactions isolation levels
• vacuuming considerations and workarounds
• statistics and indexes
• benchmarking
• comparing Postgres to some other RDBMSs
• some potential future features for PostgreSQL

Thomas Munro is a PostgreSQL developer and committer based in New Zealand. He began working full time on PostgreSQL 7 years ago, first at Enterprise DB and now at Microsoft. Before that he worked with Unix and relational databases in the web, finance, and software industries for a couple of decades.

Some of Thomas’s PostgreSQL interests include query parallelism, taming resource management, transaction machinery, portability, and modernizing database/operating system interfaces. His other non-Postgres interests include hacking on the FreeBSD operating system, trying to learn other languages, and trying to ride various things with wheels.

► Video bookmarks:
⏩ 00:00 Introduction
⏩ 03:19 What is a queue?
⏩ 05:36 Why put a queue in an RDBMS
⏩ 07:32 Example queue use cases
⏩ 09:26 How would you build a queue in Postgres
⏩ 15:34 Complications with queue processing in Postgres
⏩ 19:09 What could we do better to improve Postgres queue processing?
⏩ 24:20 Q&A with Thomas & Aaron

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