Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

Some of the most visible Service Bus (open source) frameworks around in the DotNet community, utilise MSMQ as their choice of queuing technology. MSMQ usually gets a look in as both a store and forward mechanism and endpoint in those cases. Most would say that the options in the choice for a queuing technology are somewhat limited when it comes to being free and hence we see MSMQ fit the bill here more often than not.

It strikes me however that SQL Server Service Broker IS an option in solving this problem and in doing so we might gain some nice value added benefits . The objections to using SSB in architecting SOA solutions are generally that a multiple SQL Express Service Broker peer solution isn’t possible and that the alternative of having to use Standard or Enterprise Editions might be cost prohibitive (depending on your organisation). This complaint presupposes our intention would include using SSB features such as Services, Conversations / Dialogs etc and that ALL the messaging infrastructure would be taken care of by the out of the box SSB feature set.

Some other possible improvements on the MSMQ scenario are less friction in deployment, backup and administration, not to mention the benefit of having an instance of SQL Server close to applications that might actually be smart clients.

I feel some of my spare (?) time being lost in following this thought and moving it to code!