Postgres is All You Need for Durable Workflows

Durable workflows improve program reliability by checkpointing each completed step so execution can resume after failures, traditionally using external orchestrators such as Temporal, Airflow, or AWS Step Functions to coordinate workers and store state. The post argues that this architecture adds unnecessary complexity and proposes using Postgres directly as both the checkpoint store and coordination mechanism: clients insert workflows into database tables, workers cooperatively dequeue them using locks, record step outputs, and recover failed work from saved checkpoints. This database-centered approach is presented as simpler because scalability, high availability, observability, security, and duplicate-work handling can rely on established Postgres capabilities, including horizontal worker scaling, replication and failover, SQL-based monitoring, integrity constraints, and access controls. DBOS positions its tools as a way to make Postgres-backed durable execution easier and more performant.

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