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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

i don't understand the last point of UDF. Either you need the state to be updated atomically across different systems or you don't. But writing a row in a system in order to update the second one at any random time in the future isn't really much different from enqueuing a job in queue.

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Your intuition sounds right to me.

This sounds a lot like reinventing a message queue. Someone trying this in the future might learn painful lessons about ordering, commits, partitioning, dead-letter-queues, replayability, don't-call-me-I'll-call-you, and anything else a Kafka-like comes with out of the box.

The key is that the UDF's enqueue is transactional with the database update. Let's say the database update is inserting a new order. This provides the guarantee that if a new order is inserted, a job to process the order is also enqueued. It's impossible for a new order to be inserted without its processing job also being enqueued. Then the durable workflow/queue system is responsible for making sure the processing job, once enqueued, actually executes.

And if that job never runs? Or if that job runs and then fails to commit that it ran in postgres?

The job will run the next time a worker runs (in both cases).

And doesn’t that mean the job potentially runs twice? Yes.

In DBOS there are two kinds of “things that run”: workflows, and steps (workflows are made of steps).

Workflows must be deterministic (so it’s fine if it runs twice). Steps don’t have to be deterministic but have at-least-once execution (so it’s best if these are idempotent).

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