Real-World Application Scenarios

Abstract

In this chapter, I’ll show you several real-world application scenarios where you can use Service Broker to implement scalable and reliable database solutions based on SQL Server 2008. This chapter will cover the following topics: Reliable web service requests: Calls to ASP.NET 2.0 web services aren’t very reliable because of the underlying unreliable HTTP protocol. I’ll provide you with a complete solution for using Service Broker to call ASP.NET 2.0 web services in a reliable way. Asynchronous triggers: Under normal conditions, a database trigger is executed synchronously. But what if the trigger has to do a lot of time-consuming work? In this case, it would be great if the functionality of the trigger could be executed in an asynchronous fashion. With the use of Service Broker, this is possible. I’ll show you a complete sample that implements an asynchronous trigger with the use of Service Broker. Workflow-driven Service Broker solutions: When you implement Service Broker solutions, you are always modeling a message exchange workflow between several Service Broker services. Think back to Chapter 6, where the OrderService initiated additional conversations with several other Service Broker services. The .NET Framework 3.0 consists of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a technology for implementing workflow-driven applications. I’ll show you how you can combine Service Broker and WF to build Service Broker applications directly with WF. Batch frameworks:Many people around the world have implemented various batch job systems with SQL Server. But what would you say if you could use the features provided by Service Broker to implement an asynchronous, reliable, secure, and distributed batch framework based on the SQLCLR? I’ll show you how to make this possible. Publish-subscribe frameworks: Service Broker doesn’t provide out-of-the-box functionalities for publish-subscribe scenarios. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve such scenarios with Service Broker. I’ll show you how to implement a complete publish-subscribe framework with Service Broker.