Committer here. I would love to hear more about this scenario.
Is the proposal to be able to export pg_dump formatted data on some schedule or trigger, entirely hosted in PostgreSQL and with timeouts? There are already extension that can export to blob/file storage and can be combined with pg_durable or pg_cron, so I assume the challenge is pg_dump compatible data export from SQL running in the database?
Long-running jobs on Postgres are not new at all. See pg_cron for one example. At the end of the day, these workloads would be running anyway against the database, whether triggered by an external component. HTTP queries from the database have also become more popular to avoid round-trips and failure points from additional components in data or AI pipelines. But yes, whether to bring the compute to the data or vice-versa is a design choice that has a lot of contention.
Contributor here. Good points, we do need to develop some best practices around managing function versioning and lifecycle for pg_durable.
https://github.com/microsoft/duroxide - also OSS, the durable execution framework pg_durable is built on itself supports function versions. We can leverage that to get similar support in pg_durable.
Contributor here. At Microsoft, our Postgres customers seem to split pretty evenly into 2 camps, those that want to do as much as they can in the database, and those that agree with your take - want to keep apps and compute outside the DB.
Contributor here - at Microsoft we've built AI workflows on pg_durable and seen it substantially reduce code and increase reliability. Agree that the DSL ergonomics can be improved. Our pipelines use a higher level language and therefore simplified, but pg_durable is meant to solve a wider array of problems. We're happy to take suggestions for improvements.
Is the proposal to be able to export pg_dump formatted data on some schedule or trigger, entirely hosted in PostgreSQL and with timeouts? There are already extension that can export to blob/file storage and can be combined with pg_durable or pg_cron, so I assume the challenge is pg_dump compatible data export from SQL running in the database?