Django Channels, which is slated for inclusion in one of the next Django releases, covers at least some of the use cases you'd traditionally use Celery for, specifically running code after returning a response. It does require Redis for this though.

https://channels.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Out of curiosity: How would you do that - "easier" and without separate DB?

If "something like celery built in" means a tool that runs Django as a network service in a concurrent context, with APIs to allow asynchronous processing of tasks, you might want hendrix, which serves Django on Twisted:

https://github.com/hendrix/hendrix

(Others have pointed to django-channels, for which hendrix may eventually evolve into a backend)

Are you looking for something like https://github.com/andrewgodwin/channels

Isn't celery plug and play nowadays? If you need a something simpler take a look at django-rq. I don't think a serious job queue is possbile with RDBMS as backend.