What is Oban queue

Oban's primary goals are reliability, consistency and observability.

Oban is a powerful and flexible library that can handle a wide range of background job use cases, and it is well-suited for systems of any size. It provides a simple and consistent API for scheduling and performing jobs, and it is built to be fault-tolerant and easy to monitor.

Oban is fundamentally different from other background job processing tools because it retains job data for historic metrics and inspection. You can leave your application running indefinitely without worrying about jobs being lost or orphaned due to crashes.

Advantages Over Other Tools

Fewer Dependencies — If you are running a web app there is a very good chance that you're running on top of a SQL database. Running your job queue within a SQL database minimizes system dependencies and simplifies data backups.

Transactional Control — Enqueue a job along with other database changes, ensuring that everything is committed or rolled back atomically.

Database Backups — Jobs are stored inside of your primary database, which means they are backed up together with the data that they relate to.

Advanced Features

Isolated Queues — Jobs are stored in a single table but are executed in distinct queues. Each queue runs in isolation, ensuring that a job in a single slow queue can't back up other faster queues.

Queue Control — Queues can be started, stopped, paused, resumed and scaled independently at runtime locally or across all running nodes (even in environments like Heroku, without distributed Erlang).

Resilient Queues — Failing queries won't crash the entire supervision tree, instead a backoff mechanism will safely retry them again in the future.

Job Canceling — Jobs can be canceled in the middle of execution regardless of which node they are running on. This stops the job at once and flags it as cancelled.

Triggered Execution — Insert triggers ensure that jobs are dispatched on all connected nodes as soon as they are inserted into the database.

Unique Jobs — Duplicate work can be avoided through unique job controls. Uniqueness can be enforced at the argument, queue, worker and even sub-argument level for any period of time.

Scheduled Jobs — Jobs can be scheduled at any time in the future, down to the second.

Periodic (CRON) Jobs — Automatically enqueue jobs on a cron-like schedule. Duplicate jobs are never enqueued, no matter how many nodes you're running.

Job Priority — Prioritize jobs within a queue to run ahead of others with ten levels of granularity.

Historic Metrics — After a job is processed the row isn't deleted. Instead, the job is retained in the database to provide metrics. This allows users to inspect historic jobs and to see aggregate data at the job, queue or argument level.

Node Metrics — Every queue records metrics to the database during runtime. These are used to monitor queue health across nodes and may be used for analytics.

Graceful Shutdown — Queue shutdown is delayed so that slow jobs can finish executing before shutdown. When shutdown starts queues are paused and stop executing new jobs. Any jobs left running after the shutdown grace period may be rescued later.

Telemetry Integration — Job life-cycle events are emitted via Telemetry integration. This enables simple logging, error reporting and health checkups without plug-ins.

References:

https://github.com/oban-bg/oban