Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Service Broker

Service Broker Conversations

Published 2016-04-06 by Kevin Feasel

Colleen Morrow goes into conversations in the context of Service Broker:

Like real-life conversations, Service Broker conversations are a reliable-bidirectional stream of messages exchanged between two participating services.  A Service Broker conversation can be short-lived, a simple exchange of 2 messages, or it can span days, weeks, even years.  There are two key elements of a Service Broker conversation that are important to note, however.  The first is that messages are guaranteed to be delivered in order, and only once.  Service Broker uses sequencing and acknowledgement mechanisms to ensure this.  The second key is that conversations are persistent.  Persistent across network interruptions.  Across server restarts.  In fact, conversations persist until they are explicitly ended.

In the world of Service Broker, you’ll sometimes see the term “conversation” used.  Sometimes it’s “dialog”.  Sometimes it’s even “dialog conversation”.  Although “conversation” and “dialog” are distinct concepts in the greater world of messaging services, in the context of Service Broker they are interchangeable.

We’re getting close to seeing Service Broker in action here, so stay tuned.

Comments closed

Service Broker Architecture

Published 2016-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Colleen Morrow gives explanations for various Service Broker components:

Before I jump into the technical details of the Service Broker architecture, I think it helps to have a real-world analogy of what Service Broker is and does.  In the last installment, I used the example of ordering something from Amazon.com.  This time, I’d like to use an analogy that’s somewhat timely: taxes.

Each year, we fill out that 1040 or 1040EZ form and we send it to the Internal Revenue Service.  Maybe we eFile, maybe we mail it in, it doesn’t matter.  That form is received by the IRS and goes into a queue, awaiting review.  At some point, days, maybe weeks later, our tax return is processed.  If all goes well, our return is approved and the IRS cuts us a check.  That is a Service Broker application.

When I first started learning Service Broker, it seemed like there were a lot of abstract notions (mostly because I didn’t know anything about message queues).  The pieces all start to come together once you get into an application.

Comments closed

Introduction To Service Broker

Published 2016-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Colleen Morrow is starting a series on Service Broker:

So why am I such a big fan of Service Broker and if it’s so great, why isn’t everybody using it? Let me start by telling you why I’m such a fan.

  • Asynchronous – The biggest benefit of Service Broker, or probably any messaging technology, is that is decouples long running processing from the client application.  A great example of what I mean by this is Amazon.com.  When you place an order at Amazon, a whole series of backend processes are initiated.  Your payment is processed, inventory is verified and updated, fulfillment and shipping is initiated, etc.  All of which ultimately end with a box arriving on your doorstep.  But the website doesn’t wait for all of that stuff to finish before it thanks you for your order.  Your order information is added to a queue and the page returns.  All that other stuff is handled asynchronously.  And that’s what Service Broker lets you do in your database.

I think the biggest impediment to adoption of Service Broker is that there was never a friendly UI.  The same applied to Extended Events in 2008.  Both involve a non-trivial amount of setup and maintenance, and the tooling just hasn’t been there for Service Broker.  I know they’re still making (minor) improvements to the product, but if they wanted a big improvement, putting a friendly UI tie-in with Management Studio would go a long way.

1 Comment