Implementing Durable Workflows on Postgres Without an External Orchestrator
InfoQ, Monday, September 14th, 2026
PostgreSQL can run durable workflows using SKIP LOCKED queues, idempotent checkpoints and lease-based recovery.
Instead of deploying an external orchestrator such as Temporal, teams can use PostgreSQL itself as the workflow engine. SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED builds a concurrent work queue where each row is claimed by exactly one worker.
Idempotency comes from primary-key constraints on step checkpoints, so a crashed worker can safely re-execute without duplicating side effects.
Recovery uses a lease-and-sweeper pattern: workers heartbeat to extend leases, and a periodic sweeper re-enqueues expired ones. Durable sleeps and human approvals become persisted database state, observability collapses to ordinary SQL queries, and the architecture removes an additional stateful component from the stack.