PostgreSQL has a great feature called Foreign Data Wrappers (FDW) that allows it to connect directly to outside systems. Although the setup can be a little complicated, once it’s available you can run queries with joins or subqueries against them, insert data, create views, etc. Heroku has dramatically simplified the process of using FDW with PostgreSQL and Redis thanks to Data Links. Let’s try it out.
At work earlier today I ran across an issue where one of our application queues got backed up and it got me to thinking about how queues are organized in general. The TLDR answer: use urgency and intensity.