PostgreSQL 18 with PGMQ on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Overview

PGMQ turns PostgreSQL into a message queue. Queues are ordinary tables and the entire API is a set of SQL functions, so you create a queue, send a JSONB message, read it with a visibility timeout and archive it without adding a broker, a second cluster or another service to monitor. It gives you the semantics teams expect from a queue, delivery counting so poison messages surface, archiving so processed work stays auditable, and unlogged and partitioned queue shapes for high throughput and cheap retention.

The reason teams choose it is transactional integrity. Because the queue shares a database with the application data, enqueuing a job and writing the row that job refers to commit in one transaction, so a message is never published for work that was rolled back and never lost for work that was committed. That removes an entire class of dual write bugs that appear whenever the queue is a separate system, and it means existing backups, monitoring and replication already cover the queue.

Common uses

• Background jobs and task queues that commit in the same transaction as your data
• Event and work distribution between services without running a separate broker
• Durable retry and dead letter handling using visibility timeouts and delivery counts