by Example

A work-queue retention policy satisfies a very common use case of queuing up messages that are intended to be processed once and only once.

This retention policy supports queuing up messages from publishers independent of consummption. Since each message is intended to be processed only once, this retention type allows for a set of consumers that have non-overlapping interest on subjects. In other words, if multiple consumers are bound to a work-queue stream, they must have disjoint filter subjects. This is in constrast to a standard limits-based or interest-based stream which supports multiple consumers with overlapping interest.

Like the interest policy this retention policy is additive to any limits set on the stream. As a contrived example, if max-msgs is set to one with old messages being discarded, every new message that is received by the stream will result in the prior message being deleted regardless if any subscriptions were available to process the message.

In this example, we will walk through the work-queue retention setup and behavior. If you are new to streams, it is recommended to read the limits-based stream example prior to reading this one.