This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while. After my day today i felt that it was best that i put my thoughts about service broker down.
In a project that i worked on about 2 years ago Service Broker was used as part of the system to perform data validation. If success was measured by the amount of time that a system has been in production without major issues then i can say that it was successful.
But if a system was to be judged by how much of a pain it is to maintain then l must say that its was not a glowing success. Below is a list of things that i found as good or bad about it.
Bad things
- Limited information on the internet
- Testing is extremely hard (compromises everywhere)
- Troubleshooting is a pain
- It could stop working and you may never know, (if using a fire and forget mechanism)
- Poison messages disable queues (would have been nicer if it moved the message to a error queue)
Good things
- Its Asynchronous
- Its Asynchronous
- Its Asynchronous
Yes this list is one sided but true. The question that is important though is
Would i use Service Broker again?
The answer to that question is strangely YES. Only in very specific circumstances where system is ok with not having some data loss because of queue being disabled
What would I use instead?
NServiceBus of course. It provides an answer to all the negatives of service broker and is still asynchronous.
