We all know Postgres is a great relational database (you do know that, don’t you?). When it comes time for a pub/sub solution, however, we often reach for Kafka, Redis, or RabbitMQ. But did you know that Postgres is pretty well suited as a persistent pub/sub server as well?

There are very few use cases where you’d need a dedicated pub/sub server like Kafka. Postgres can easily handle 10,000 insertions per second, and it can be tuned to even higher numbers. It’s rarely a mistake to start with Postgres and then switch out the most performance critical parts of your system when the time comes.

Check the linked article for how they use Postgres in this fashion and a nice list of other benefits. For my money, the fact that I’m not adding another moving part to my infrastructure is reason enough to start with Postgres and go from there.