Service Broker Activation

Abstract

With activation, you can specify that Service Broker starts a service program automatically as soon as a new message arrives at a queue. In this chapter, I’ll present activation in detail and show you how you can use it to implement great Service Broker solutions. In this chapter, I’ll cover the following:

• Activation basics: Activation allows you to start a service program as soon as a new message arrives in a service queue. With activation, you can process received messages automatically without any additional coding efforts.

• Internal activation: With internal activation, you have the ability to activate a stored procedure as soon as a new message arrives. As you’ll see, there are several options, as well as some issues you must be careful of.

• External activation: External activation allows you to start an external application when a message arrives in a service queue. You can move long-running processing logic away from SQL Server and put it into separate processes for better performance and scalability.

• Parallel activation: Normally, activated stored procedures are only started when Service Broker encounters receiving new messages. However, there are some tricks to starting more than one stored procedure simult aneously for message processing.

• Troubleshooting activation: If you’re not careful during activation setup, you could encounter several problems. You’ll learn about common configuration issues introduced with Service Broker activation.