Message queues are great ways to scale out your application, among other uses.

I had high hopes for Service Broker when it was introduced in SQL Server 2005, but it doesn’t seem that many people have bothered to architect their applications to take advantage of it. I do see some people starting to use it, but it hasn’t been anywhere near the levels of adoption that I would expect.

I ran across a piece on 10 reasons to use a message queue that points out a number of possible ways that queuing could help you. There are some great ideas, including a few suggestions for scalability and resiliency for your application. One of the more interesting ones to me is the idea of using a queue to buffer the slower processes that may be a bottleneck in your application.

I still think this is a great way to build applications, especially distributed ones, using queues instead of linked servers, ETL, etc. However until we get more people developing in a service oriented architecture, and getting experience, I think we will struggle to see message queuing gain widespread acceptance. This is a departure from the way most developers are comfortable with building an application, and the way that queues work in SQL Server certainly confuses many DBAs.

I’d challenge many of you to think about using queuing in any applications where you are moving data from one database to another, or trying to trigger an action on a remote machine. It’s a great way to scale out your systems, and it’s a very solid, reliable architecture for your systems.

Steve Jones

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