It's not really, although you really want to do it with a data store that supports transactional semantics. Postgres, MySQL with InnoDB,Redis, Amazon SQS, Dyna

It's not really, although you really want to do it with a data store that supports transactional semantics. Postgres, MySQL with InnoDB,Redis, Amazon SQS, DynamoDB will all work. First time I used this pattern was with Amazon SQS; second time was MySQL with InnoDB tables. The article's about Postgres hacks, though, and Postgres is pretty commonly used for other parts of your system.