Justy: Okay so Microsoft just open-sourced this thing called pg_durable.
Cody: The name sounds like a gym membership.
Justy: Right? But it’s a Postgres extension that runs durable workflows straight inside the database.
Cody: So like… Temporal but for SQL?
Justy: Exactly. No more stitching together cron jobs and message queues just to make a long SQL function fault-tolerant.
Cody: Mm-hm.
Justy: They’re saying you define the whole workflow in SQL— retries, fan-out, all that— and the extension just handles it. Crashes? Restarts? It resumes from the last checkpoint.
Cody: Wait— so the database is now also the orchestrator?
Justy: Yep. And they’ve got these operators like pipe-arrow-equals and tilde-greater-than…
Cody: Of course they do.
Justy: Anyway — how was the flight in?
Cody: Late. Then the Metro was a parking lot. I swear DC traffic gets worse every time I visit.
Justy: You could’ve just stayed in LA with me. We’ve got sun and also the 405.
Cody: Tempting… but then who’d keep you from hyping every new Microsoft repo on Exploring Next?
Justy: Fair. But this one’s actually kind of neat— the example they gave is a durable function that processes documents in steps, updates a table, all in one SQL chain.
Cody: Okay okay. So it checkpoints the state in Postgres tables?
Justy: Yep. And if the DB crashes mid-workflow, it picks up where it left off.
Cody: Right. And they’re positioning it for vector embedding pipelines with pgvector, scheduled maintenance, stuff that talks to external APIs.
Justy: I mean that’s the dream, right? All your ETL and background jobs just… live in SQL.
Cody: Or the nightmare. You ever try debugging a sprawling SQL workflow after it dies?
Justy: Cody.
Cody: I’m just saying— if the workflow’s complex enough, you’re still gonna want logs, metrics, maybe a UI. And now it’s all inside Postgres.
Justy: But for teams that are already all-in on Postgres, this could cut out a ton of glue code.
Cody: Sure. If your workflows aren’t that gnarly.
Justy: They built it on these Rust libraries— duroxide and duroxide-pg.
Cody: Ah. So now your Postgres extension has a Rust dependency chain to maintain.
Justy: I think the trade-off’s worth it for the right use case.
Cody: Mm. Maybe.
Justy: Anyway. I’m gonna go play with it this weekend. If it works, I’m pitching it for the next embedding pipeline.
Cody: And if it doesn’t?
Justy: Then I’ll complain about it on episode four seventy SEVEN.