zlacker

>>hyzyla+(OP)
You really don't need anything fancy to implement a queue using SQL. You need a table with a primary id and a "status" field. An "expired" field can be used instead of the "status". We used the latter because it allows easy retries.

1. SELECT item_id WHERE expire = 0. If this is empty, no items are available.

2. UPDATE SET expire = some_future_time WHERE item_id = $selected_item_id AND expire = 0. Then check whether UPDATE affected any rows. If it did, item_id is yours. If not, loop. If the database has a sane optimizer it'll note at most one document needs locking as the primary id is given.

All this needs is a very weak property: document level atomic UPDATE which can return whether it changed anything. (How weak? MongoDB could do that in 2009.)

Source code at https://git.drupalcode.org/project/drupal/-/blob/9.2.x/core/... (We cooked this up for Drupal in 2009 but I am reasonably sure we didn't invent anything new.)

Of course, this is not the fastest job queue there is but it is quite often good enough.

>>_ugfj+z2
Oh please stop using databases as queues. I spent a disproportionate amount of time in the last 20 years undoing that decision. It doesn’t scale at all well.

>>hughrr+gc
It can absolutely scale well if you design the database properly. However, it’ll probably be fairly high latency compared to a Redis or Kafka stream.

The things that often make databases appear slow is that they’re typically configured for large random reads rather than small uniform writes. And they have insane initial response times because of all the IPC they typically do when starting a session.

But aside from that, if you use a heap table without an index you’ll can probably get similar throughout to Kafka. And if you turn Fsync off you might even get up to REDIS speeds.