Show HN: DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows
10 comments
·November 13, 2025reecardo
We are increasingly using Temporal with Temporal Cloud and soon Nexus to manage numerous workflows. I'm curious what type of observability is avialable for DBOS and how much of that you get for "free". The reason we ended up in Temporal was not that previous job-systems were unreliable, it was simply that nobody wanted to go dig through a database to find out what happened with their job, and nobody has time/energy to build a UI just for that purpose.
KraftyOne
There's an observability and workflow management UI: https://docs.dbos.dev/java/tutorials/workflow-management
You can view your workflows and queues, search/filter them by any number of criteria, visualize graphs of workflow steps, cancel workflows, resume workflows, restart workflows from a specific step--everything you'd want.
Currently, this is available as a managed offering (Conductor - https://docs.dbos.dev/production/self-hosting/conductor), but we're also releasing a self-hostable version of it soon.
nogridbag
Are there any plans for supporting other databases? Our company primarily uses and has experience managing MySQL deployments. I evaluated Temporal some time ago as it seemed like a good fit for what we're building so I'm watching this closely. Thanks!
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KraftyOne
Our primary focus is Postgres. DBOS Python recently added SQLite support, we'll add this to other languages if it proves popular, but no current plans for MySQL.
That said, while DBOS requires Postgres for its own checkpoints, it can (and often is) used alongside other databases like MySQL for application data.
qianli_cs
To build on what Peter said, we need to stay focused and make one backend solid before expanding. But architecturally, nothing prevents us from supporting more engines going forward.
prasadaditya
Hey! Not a DBOS Java question but stumbled on this and looking into it for the python client. Wondering what the support looks like for integration w/ gevent?
KraftyOne
DBOS Python works with gevent out of the box (sync DBOS uses Python threading APIs and psycopg3 that gevent monkeypatches).
Have you run into any issues using DBOS Python with gevent? Please let us know!
stankygenki
Upvote on this! Currently building out a project using Flask and gevent, and would love to use DBOS python with my Flask gevent project
lukaszkorecki
Looks great, shame that due to annotation-based API it's gonna be a pain to use in Clojure.
Hi HN - I’m Peter, here with Harry (devhawk), and we’re building DBOS Java, an open-source Java library for durable workflows, backed by Postgres.
https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-java
Essentially, DBOS helps you write long-lived, reliable code that can survive failures, restarts, and crashes without losing state or duplicating work. As your workflows run, it checkpoints each step they take in a Postgres database. When a process stops (fails, restarts, or crashes), your program can recover from those checkpoints to restore its exact state and continue from where it left off, as if nothing happened.
In practice, this makes it easier to build reliable systems for use cases like AI agents, payments, data synchronization, or anything that takes hours, days, or weeks to complete. Rather than bolting on ad-hoc retry logic and database checkpoints, durable workflows give you one consistent model for ensuring your programs can recover from any failure from exactly where they left off.
This library contains all you need to add durable workflows to your program: there's no separate service or orchestrator or any external dependencies except Postgres. Because it's just a library, you can incrementally add it to your projects, and it works out of the box with frameworks like Spring. And because it's built on Postgres, it natively supports all the tooling you're familiar with (backups, GUIs, CLI tools) and works with any Postgres provider.
If you want to try it out, check out the quickstart:
https://docs.dbos.dev/quickstart?language=java
We'd love to hear what you think! We’ll be in the comments for the rest of the day to answer any questions.