Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

> What’s unique about DBOS’s take on durable execution (compared to, say, Temporal) is that it’s implemented in a lightweight library that’s totally backed by Postgres. All you have to do to use DBOS is “npm install” it and annotate your program with decorators. The decorators store your program’s execution state in Postgres as it runs and recover it if it crashes. There are no other dependencies you have to manage, no separate workflow server–just your program and Postgres.

this is good until you the postgres server fills up with load and need to scale up/fan out work to a bunch of workers? how do you handle that?

(disclosure, former temporal employee, but also no hate meant, i'm all for making more good orcehstration choices)

That's a really good question! Because DBOS is backed by Postgres, it scales as well as Postgres does, so 10K+ steps per second with a large database server. That's good for most workloads. Past that, you can split your workload into multiple services or shard it. Past that, you've probably outscaled any Postgres-based solution (very few services need this scale).

The big advantages of using Postgres are:

1. Simpler architecturally, as there are no external dependencies.

2. You have complete control over your execution state, as it's all on tables on your Postgres server (docs for those tables: https://docs.dbos.dev/explanations/system-tables#system-tabl...)

Unaffiliated with DBOS but I agree that Postgres will scale much further than most startups will ever need! Even Meta still runs MySQL under the hood (albeit with a very thick layer of custom ORM).

yeah its not really about steps per second, its about if steps have heavy processing workload each, eg you dont want to clog up your postgres with a bunch of media processing or basically literally anything long running, which is the point of a separate workflow engine

I don't think the processing happens in postgres at all, it's just handling the transactions and queues.

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