Microsoft has open-sourced pg_durable, a PostgreSQL extension that runs durable, fault-tolerant workflows inside the database itself, with no separate orchestrator.
A pg_durable function is a graph of SQL steps that Postgres executes and checkpoints as it goes. If the database crashes, restarts, or a step fails, execution resumes from the last durable checkpoint instead of rerunning work that already succeeded. The pitch is aimed squarely at the scaffolding teams bolt on today: pg_cron plus a jobs table and retry counters, or an external orchestrator like Airflow, Temporal or Step Functions calling back into Postgres.
Microsoft names AI work as a target: chunk a document, call an embedding API, upsert into pgvector, durably, per row. It ships inside Azure HorizonDB, Microsoft's new managed Postgres, which tells you where this is really pointed. The open question is whether durable execution belongs in the database or should stay a separate concern.