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Comment by branko_d | Hacker News Reader

Why use string as status, instead of a boolean? That just wastes space for no discernable benefit, especially since the status is indexed. Also, consider turning event_type into an integer if possible, for similar reasons.

Furthermore, why have two indexes with the same leading field (status)?

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Boolean is rarely enough for real production workloads. You need a 'processing' state to handle visibility timeouts and prevent double-execution, especially if tasks take more than a few milliseconds. I also find it crucial to distinguish between 'retrying' for transient errors and 'failed' for dead letters. Saving a few bytes on the index isn't worth losing that observability.

> Boolean is rarely enough for real production workloads. You need a 'processing' ... 'retrying'... 'failed' ...

If you have more than 2 states, then just use integer instead or boolean.

> Saving a few bytes on the index isn't worth losing that observability.

Not sure why having a few well-known string values is more "observable" than having a few well-known integer values.

Also, it might be worth having better write performance. When PostgreSQL updates a row, it actually creates a new physical row version (for MVCC), so the less it has to copy the better.

Postgres supports enum that would fit this use case well. You get the readability of text and the storage efficiency of an integer. Adding new values used to require a bit of work, but version 9.1 introduced support for it.

Postgres does index de-duplication. So it's likely that even if you change the strings to enums, the index won't be that much smaller.

> Furthermore, why have two indexes with the same leading field (status)?

That indeed is a valid question.

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