PostgreSQL: good option for persistence in production?

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Hello dear community !

In my company, we started to use Temporal in different teams for production purpose.
We chose to deploy Temporal with a PostgreSQL persistence backend, for two main reasons: we have a dedicated team with a big knowledge of PostgreSQL who can provide managed PostgreSQL instances, and we don’t have Cassandra experts in my company.

We noticed a couple of things while using Temporal over PostgreSQL:

  • looking at the database schema and the way data are stored, it looks like Temporal works for on a relational database, but does not perfectly fit for a relational database (looks like there’s a lot of encoded data with not so much relation between tables and objects, etc.)
  • we had some strange issue where Temporal server went up to 600/700 simultaneous connections with a spike, with maxConns properly set to 20.
  • we noticed that latency between database and Temporal server has a huge impact on workflow executions performances, as there’s a lot of queries during a workflow execution

We are now wondering if PostgreSQL is supported mainly for development purpose, or if we can go with this persistence backend in production ?
Is there any particular things we need to care about this kind of deployment ? A specific configuration, or stuff like this ?

Does anyone is running Temporal with huge load on PostgreSQL ? Any feedback ?

Thanks a lot !

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Many users run with PostgreSQL in production. Temporal is indeed pretty chatty by design. So there is a limit to how far you can scale on a single DB server.

Does anyone is running Temporal with huge load on PostgreSQL ? Any feedback ?

Define “huge”. We recommend Cassandra for huge loads as it scales out to many servers.

Consider using Temporal Cloud that can support practically any load out of the box.

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@Nathan I think @maxim 's solution is by far the best one, but if you need to self-manage Temporal for some reason, just realize that you may not need Cassandra experts as much as you think, DataStax offers a serverless managed service built on Cassandra, Astra DB.