Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems — Blog

The goal was never to replace Kafka with PostgreSQL. Kafka remained the backbone for high-throughput event ingestion, while PostgreSQL handled what it does best—durability, querying, and observability around failures. By letting each system play to its strengths, we ended up with a pipeline that was resilient, debuggable, and easy to operate. In the end, using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue turned failure handling into something boring and predictable. And in production systems, boring is exactly what you want.