After missing for over a year I decided to start blogging again. Much has changed. I no longer work in the SQL Server Engine team on Service Broker. I moved to the Zune team to work on web-services that power the Zune marketplace and have been quite busy...

After receiving several requests, I have put together simple documentation on how to use the External Activator sample here .

If you are wondering if the disappearance of images from my blog had anything to do with moving it back to blogs.msdn.com, you are on the right track. The reason I moved the blog was that my computer which was hosting the blog had a RAID-0 failure causing...

One of the prime use cases of the CLR integration in SQL Server 2005 is to make outbound HTTP requests to web applications or web services. But how do you do that reliably given the large number of failures that need to be handled ranging from network...

Following up on my previous post regarding how to talk to partitioned services with data dependent routing, here is another mechanism -- redirection. One of the main drawbacks of having the routing service forward messages to the final target service...

One strategy to achieve scale-out is replicating data. Another is partitioning. Each has its own advantages and limitations; and you’d use one over the other depending on the nature of the data itself as well as the access pattern. While Service Broker...

My teammate Remus Rusanu spawned his blog today with a great article on how to write a simple publish-subscribe service in SQL Server 2005 using Service Broker. While SQL Server 2005 does not natively support a pub-sub architecture and the only type of...

The official documentation for SQL Server 2005 (called 'Books Online') is now available on MSDN. You can read the Service Broker section by clicking on the following link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms166043(en-US,SQL.90).aspx

You can now download the demos used in Gerald and Roger's PDC talk on the Service Broker from SSB CodeGallery . The demos include: Basics - Creating metadata, beginning a dialog, sending a message and receiving a message. CLR Services - Writing...

You implemented a Service Broker service and now want others to be able to talk to it. But they will have to first create your message types and contracts to be able to begin a dialog and send messages to your target service. If their service does not...

Following up on my article titled " Activating queue reader processes on demand ", we are launching the External Activator sample. This sample demonstrates how you can build scalable Service Broker applications as executable processes that may be started...

It has been a week since I posted BrokerChallenge 0 and I am quite happy to see several people successfully cracked it. Still others gave it a shot but were not completely successful. So I decided to post the solution to the challenge. You can get the...

Over the past week I have been planning to launch the first open to public Service Broker. At the same time, my dev team was having a discussion regarding how we can do something cool and interesting to get the community involved in our product. So I...

Where do relational databases systems fit to provide reliability, scalability and resilience to loosely-coupled world of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Fueled by XML, CLR hosting, integration with Visual Studio 2005, native web-services, asynchronous...

[Attachment: ShippingRowsets.zip ] While there are technologies such as log shipping, SQL Server Replication Service and database mirroring available for various scenarios that require maintaining a copy of the data in a secondary source, several customers...

DBAs often struggle with setting up automated tasks for managing databases such as taking backups, maintaining warehouses, re-building indexes and generating scheduled reports just to mention a few. While Service Broker is seen mostly as a framework for...

[Attachment: CommodityExchange.zip ] We studied auctions in our e-commerce and AI classes at U of M . In one of our assignments we were asked to configure an agent that played the Trading Agent Competition ( TAC ) which involved a variety of auctions...

The Rational Guide To SQL Server 2005 Service Broker (Beta Preview) by Roger Wolter ISBN: 1932577203 Roger, our group program manager for Service Broker is writing a book on developing and deploying Service Broker applications. The beta preview version...

Having built webapps in Java and PHP, I have been curious about ASP.NET. So I decided to teach myself some basic ASP.NET programming by building a useful webapp. A common problem that I've faced going for dinners/movies/shopping with other single friends...

Today, we did a short presentation on Service Broker for a customer who is interested in using the Service Broker technology. Their current application uses a large backend SQL Server database that is accessed from several mid-tier servers. In one of...

Niels Berglund has posted a much wanted tool for Service Broker. SSB Admin is a GUI application for managing and creating Service Broker objects in SQL Server 2005. For more information see his recent blog post .

A lot of people have been concerned about using the WAITFOR (RECEIVE ...) statement for receiving Service Broker messages from a queue. Several believe that this would poll the queue continuously until messages become available in the queue either by...

Anyone who has written a web application has probably experienced the cost of doing a database round trip for fetching a result set everytime a web user loads a page. In fact, handling a page request may involve more than one queries (imagine 20 drop...

Having seen implementations of MSMQ, SMTP and UDP transport providers for WSE, I was sure someone would come up with one for Service Broker as well. I played around with this for a bit but only got to implement the sender side. Mike Taulty recently released...

One of the cool uses of SQL Service Broker is event notification. SQL Server 2005 introduces a mechanism for notifying events such as execution of a DDL statement or occurence of a SQL Trace event to a Service Broker service. Notifications are delivered...