Stopping and Starting Service Broker Applications

Sometimes it might be necessary to temporarily stop a Service Broker application. For example,

you might stop a busy application to install an updated version of the activation stored

procedure for the queue. Although you can alter the queue without stopping the application,

the copies of the activation stored procedure that are currently running might never run out of

messages to process, and therefore might never exit. In this case, stopping the queue causes

the running stored procedures to exit immediately. When you start the service again, the

Service Broker starts the updated activation stored procedure.

The information in this section applies to stopping an application temporarily for maintenance

purposes. For information about permanently removing a service from the database, see

Uninstall Service Broker applications.

To temporarily stop a service, alter the queue that the application uses so that the queue status

is. When the queue status is

, the queue is unavailable for receive operations, which

effectively stops the application. Service Broker doesn’t deliver new messages to the queue and

doesn’t allow an application to receive messages from the queue. When an application

attempts to receive a message from a queue that’s unavailable, the application receives a

Transact-SQL error. An application can call

on a conversation at any time,

regardless of whether the queue that the conversation uses is available or not. However,

Service Broker doesn’t deliver the End Dialog message to the remote service until the queue

becomes available.

When a message arrives for a stopped queue, Service Broker holds the message in the

transmission queue for the database until the destination queue becomes available. Service

Broker doesn’t consider a message arriving for a stopped queue to be an error, and doesn’t

notify the sender. When the queue becomes available, Service Broker delivers the messages in

the transmission queue to the service queue. This delivery uses the normal retry logic for

messages. Messages are marked delayed in the transmission queue, and retried periodically.

Service Broker holds the message in the transmission queue and delays the message regardless

of whether the message originates in the same instance as the queue or arrives from the

network.

Stopping a queue doesn’t reset the conversation timer or the dialog lifetime timer for

messages in the queue. If either timer expires while the queue is stopped, Service Broker

generates the appropriate messages when the queue starts again.

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END CONVERSATION