It depends on the database back-end you use; it can use libmemcached which opens up the possibility to use a CouchBase cluster if you really need to go that far.
Forgot to say that a decent job manager should be sufficiently composable that you can integrate a GUI and high-level monitoring into it by exploiting its API.
I consider the persistence layer a private implementation detail of a system. If Gearman controls an RDBMS schema, for example, I don't want to bypass Gearmen to mess with that directly, ever. But as far as I can see, German doesn't have an API to access anything in the queue.
