Meme Week: Queue in the Database


When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t even know how to use a hammer correctly.

You really shouldn’t be doing queues in the database because:

  • They’re a blocking nightmare, constantly locking rows in highly concurrent tables
  • They’re a logging nightmare, constantly pouring data into the transaction log
  • They’re an HA/DR nightmare, constantly causing slow writes to your sync replicas
  • They’re a backup nightmare, constantly changing pages that bloat your differential backups
  • They’re a licensing nightmare, causing a lot of work on an expensive relational database for tables that have no relational joins to anything else whatsoever
  • There are simple, cheap queueing alternatives like Amazon SQS and a few in Azure

If you really gotta do queues in SQL Server, read how to use locking hints.