Build Reliable Notifications with Postgres

Postgres can serve as a reliable messaging system for applications already using it as a data store by representing notifications as database rows and relying on transactional guarantees for exactly-once message production and consumption. Messages can be inserted alongside related business operations in a single transaction, preventing partial workflows such as processing payment without scheduling shipment, while unique message IDs act as idempotency keys to prevent duplicate inserts and processing under concurrent workers. To avoid inefficient polling, Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY can alert consumers when rows are inserted, with triggers sending destination and topic information through notification payloads. Because transient connection failures can cause consumers to miss these signals, applications should query the notifications table after reconnecting and use exponential backoff with jitter to prevent reconnection storms from overwhelming the database.

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