PostgreSQL as Your Workflow Engine: Questioning the Need for Dedicated Services

PostgreSQL's transaction semantics can now provide exactly-once guarantees for multi-step workflows without a separate orchestration service like Temporal. This architectural shift simplifies operations by eliminating external dependencies, but shifts database load and operational risk onto your production system. The crucial insight isn't whether Postgres is 'enough,' but that your specific scale and constraints should drive architecture choices, not industry convention.