Write Ahead Blog

[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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

[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...

I was tempted to post a HelloWorld sample for Service Broker, but since Roger Wolter's article already provides that, I decided to avoid the redundancy. Instead I shall describe how to setup async execution using Service Broker's activation mechanism...

I finally figured out how to get one of these .Text blogs setup on the http://blogs.msdn.com website. It was tricky to tweak the CSS in order to make it look and feel like my homepage . But finally the "Write Ahead Blog" is alive. I joined Microsoft just...

A number of large database applications require asynchronous and distributed execution. Most loosely-coupled distributed systems provide scale out and resilience by queuing operations. Queues are used extensively in applications such as order entry systems...

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...

I have been asked more than once if SQL Server Express has the Service Broker feature and if there are any limitations on the use. SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is a version of SQL Server 2005 that is available for free (strategically being released...

In a previous post , I described the basic routing architecture of Service Broker. What I did not describe was a special facility that allows you to exploit external mechanisms for finding routes. For example, an enterprise may use Active Directory or...

An often asked question about SQL Service Broker is how it compares with other products offered by Microsoft such as MSMQ, BizTalk server, WSE and its successor Indigo. So I thought I’ll take a shot at answering this politically provocative question...

Service Broker programs may be written as stand-alone applications that establish a connection with SQL Server or as stored procs that are activated internally . You can leverage the .NET platform in both scenarios since SQL Server 2005 integrates CLR...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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 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...

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...

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

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...

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...