Yeah, I'm using it as a transactional outbox to ensure at least once delivery to SNS.
Can't really think of a better way to ensure that a message is always sent if the DB transactions succeeds and is never sent if the DB transaction fails
You can get so far by ensuring at least once and making everything idempotent (will get you as close to "exactly once" as you can). With a database, the most common pattern is: insert the row for the job, when a worker starts working on it, mark it as in progress so it doesn't get started again, if the task fails, or after some reasonable time-out period, another worker can pick up the task again, ultimately the row for the task is only ever deleted when a worker successfully completes it.
