Service Broker Scalability

Service Broker is designed to help your database applications scale well, whether you scale up

or scale out. This topic provides general guidelines for designing applications that take

advantage of Service Broker.

Service Broker activation makes it easy to scale up applications as more processing power

becomes available. Conversation group locking ensures that service programs can easily avoid

the most common sources of contention.

Each Service Broker application is a set of tasks that can operate independently. Service Broker

routing allows an application that uses Service Broker to move services to different instances.

Because Service Broker handles message routing rather than the application, services can be

distributed to different computers without changing the application code.

When you design your Service Broker application for scalability, carefully consider how the

tasks in the application relate to each other. Services constructed with clear separation

between tasks are generally most successful in both scale-up and scale-out scenarios. In

general, divide tasks into services by considering the data needed to complete the task. When

two related tasks don’t modify the same data, consider structuring these tasks as different

services. For example, although both a customer-management application and a shipping

application require access to the customer address, only the customer-management

application modifies the address. In this case, messages to the shipping application can contain

the address information necessary to ship an order. Because there’s no need for the shipping

application and the customer application to access the same tables, these tasks can be

separated cleanly into different services.

Administration (Service Broker)