I ran across this post, The Database as a Queue Anti-Pattern, and it struck a chord. I both agree and disagree with the premise, and certainly see this as another case of the "it depends." However, I am curious what others think.

I had just written about this for T-SQL Tuesday #74, talking about our use of the database for queuing emails as a part of the site. It was a high volume system that worked for us. We were, of course, looking at SQL Server as a hammer, and in 2002/2003, there weren't many messaging systems available at a reasonable cost. These days it seems that Amazon SQS or Azure Service Bus are low cost ways to move messages around, but are they better than a database?

In our case, cost mattered, knowledge and skill mattered, though certainly we could have learned how to work with a messaging system. However we also had the need to feedback potential status and progress information. We also wanted the ability to re-point emails to another process if one failed. For example, if SenderB fails after having retrieved an email, we can update the table and have SenderA pick up the row(s) that haven't been processed.

I do believe that messaging is an extremely powerful architecture technique for for distributing work as well as scaling to high workloads. I'd like to see more messaging implemented in applications, even those that aren't Twitter scale. After all, if I exceed the power of a 4 core machine for my small application, it's much easier for me to add another 4 core machine that can deal with messages than upgrade to an 8 core machine and just delay the scale problem to another day.

I'm curious what the rest of you think. Is the database a good platform for a queue?