zlacker

>>bo0tzz+(OP)
For several projects I’ve opted for the even dumber approach, that works out of the box with every ORM/Query DSL framework in every language: using a normal table with SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED

https://www.pgcasts.com/episodes/the-skip-locked-feature-in-...

It’s not “web scale” but it easily extends to several thousand background jobs in my experience

>>aduffy+82
I've done even simpler without locks (as no transaction logic), where I select a row, and then try to update a field about it being taken. If 1 row is affected, it's mine. If 0, someone else did it before me and I select a new row.

I've used this for tasks at big organizations without issue. No need for any special deployments or new infra. Just spin up a few worker threads in your app. Perhaps a thread to reset abandoned tasks. But in three years this never actually happened, as everything was contained in try/catch that would add it back to the queue, and our java app was damn stable.

>>matsem+x2
The reason why you want to use skip locked is so that Postgres can automatically skip rows that are being concurrently accessed for updating the "status". You are right, if you update a "status" field you don't really need to worry about advisory locks and skipping rows that are locked but it still helps with performance if you have a decent amount of concurrent consumers polling the table.