I think the interesting part here is finding the right balance between keeping the queue simple and avoiding excessive polling or lock contention. PostgreSQL can work well for background processing when the workload and worker model are carefully designed, especially if you need reliable retries and clear task states. Another example in this space is Spooled Cloud — Open Source Job Queue on PostgreSQL, which uses PostgreSQL to store job state while the actual workers run as client-side code. That separation seems useful when you want the database to coordinate jobs without turning it into the place where application workers themselves are hosted.