I actually worked on security for Skype in 2005/2006. And I knew Dan at eBay too.
Using databases for queues isn't a new idea, but a couple things make it different now. One is that I think this is the first time a solution has been open-sourced (not 100% sure on that).
And two, Postgres added SKIP LOCKED in 9.5 (around 2016), which was the performance unlock to make this work without needing a whole DBA team like Skype had.
Skytools/PgQ was amazing technology that made clever use of Postgres MVCC to provide a high performance transactional message queue. But yes, it was not low-touch to administer.
Using databases for queues isn't a new idea, but a couple things make it different now. One is that I think this is the first time a solution has been open-sourced (not 100% sure on that).
And two, Postgres added SKIP LOCKED in 9.5 (around 2016), which was the performance unlock to make this work without needing a whole DBA team like Skype had.