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Very funny to me how much everyone went away from the db to achieve idempotent behavior, and now we're back to just using a db as a complicated queue with state.

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It turns out that DBs were invented to solve hard problems with state management. When people moved away from DBs (at least transactional relational DBs) they had to rediscover all the old problems. Tech is cyclical.

One of the motivation for DBOS is that OSes were designed with orders of magnitude less state to manage than today. (e.g. linux >30 years ago). What's made to manage tons of state? A DBMS! :)

Recovering the application from failures especially when updating multiple data sources, once and only once execution and such things are in the application domain. They have never been done by relational databases. That is the problem solved by the Python SDK of DBOS ( and typescript SDK)

It's sort of a combination of both. The library solves those problems by storing specific data in the database and then taking advantage of the database's ACID properties and transactions to make the guarantees.

Then the DBOS cloud platform optimizes those interactions between the database and code so that you get a superior experience to running locally.

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