>> with Postgres and SKIP LOCKED always cropping up Note that SKIP LOCKED is available in Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL and I believe possibly also in Oracle

>> with Postgres and SKIP LOCKED always cropping up Note that SKIP LOCKED is available in Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL and I believe possibly also in Oracle and IBM DB/2. To the article, I suspect there will be alot of detail challenged here. There's talk in here about "creating queues" to handle the fairness problem. I might be misunderstanding what the hard bit is, but with a database backed queue you don't have to create a queue - queues are virtual depending on what messages are in there and what other information is available such as username or tag. if you want to be "fair" around username then round robin on that, or fair around some other bit of data then tag the message when it goes into the queue and when you are processing, round robin on that. What is the hard bit here, what am I missing?