An Introduction to the Service Broker (SQL Server 2005)

Service Broker is a new feature in SQL Server 2005 that allows you to build reliable, asynchronous, message-based applications using extensions to the T-SQL language to process and manage queues. Since queues are managed in the database, you enjoy all the capabilities of a typical database system, which is transactions, reliability, performance, scalability etc.

Service Broker can easily scale to many thousands of messages per second and it can guarantee message ordering among the various messages and even across different reading threads! All message processing is transacted and thus recoverable. Finally, message processing and posting can be distributed across many participating SQL Servers, thus ensuring true scalability and performance. In the subsequent sections of this article, we will see the building blocks of Service Broker and write our first, simple message based application.

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