# pg_durable

10 Hacker News commenters recommended pg_durable and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Adds durable, resumable workflows inside PostgreSQL so teams can skip a separate orchestration system. Critics say embedding SQL between dollar-quotes makes the code hard to read, test and version.

## Why people recommend it

- Durable, resumable long-running jobs (2 comments): "pg_durable brings the same reliability and durablity semantics to long running operations within the database." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416149)) "Seems like an interesting idea to add durability and resumability to lengthy cron jobs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415524))

## What people warn about

- SQL embedded in code is hard to read (3 comments): "I’d rather stay out of messy SQL land for something like this if I can avoid it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48426150)) "Not sure I love the syntax and the way SQL is embedded between the $$" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414989)) "it's very bizarre to try and read this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414709))
- Doubts it is the right approach (3 comments): "These approaches always suffer from the same issues such as synchronous single threaded code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419403)) "This feels like the wrong solution to an age old problem" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414641)) "Before this I thought it was impossible to surpass Perl." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419010))
- Workflow logic kept inside database (2 comments): "you've now got the problem that there are apparently two sources of truth for that bit of the code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48415856)) "not a fan of keeping complex flows inside the DB" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427765))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [pgvector](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgvector.md): 55 recommend
- [PostGIS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgis.md): 20 recommend
- [pg_lake](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-lake.md): 18 recommend
- [ParadeDB](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paradedb.md): 13 recommend
- [pg_textsearch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-textsearch.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "pg_durable", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pg-durable/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).