What Temporal taught me about state

I've spent years building on Temporal — workflows-as-code, durable execution, the whole gospel. The thing Temporal got right, the thing that made it hard for me to go back to ordinary Redis-backed queues, is this: workflow state is durable on every step . It lives in a transactional database. There's no in-memory state that disappears on a crash, no message that's "in flight" without being persisted, no step that completes without its result being safely written.

But Temporal's durability story has a quiet caveat: it only protects state inside a workflow. The moment you have an application database alongside the workflow service — and most projects do — you're back to two systems.

Consider this signup handler:

import { Client } from " @temporalio/client " ; import { sendWelcomeEmail } from " ./workflows " ;

const temporal = new Client ();

await db . transaction ( async ( tx ) => { const user = await tx . users .…