I also have a lot of issues with people using tables and cronjobs instead of just using queues.
I once was the one implementing this stupid idea. It's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. It seems to be ok at first, but it is a stupid idea and will give nightmares to the operations team.
It works as long as the table is small. It gets especially problematic when there are sudden spikes in the workload, so that the table is growing rapidly. People don't test these scenarios enough.
Often it's important to do the jobs in the order they came in. This means you need to have the index set up this way or you'll end up with full table scans. You also need to remove jobs which are done, but this will also mess with the tables performance.
There are tricks with databases to help scaling this, but at the end of the day it's much simpler to just use a queue.
I once was the one implementing this stupid idea. It's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. It seems to be ok at first, but it is a stupid idea and will give nightmares to the operations team.
It works as long as the table is small. It gets especially problematic when there are sudden spikes in the workload, so that the table is growing rapidly. People don't test these scenarios enough.
Often it's important to do the jobs in the order they came in. This means you need to have the index set up this way or you'll end up with full table scans. You also need to remove jobs which are done, but this will also mess with the tables performance.
There are tricks with databases to help scaling this, but at the end of the day it's much simpler to just use a queue.