Locking and Transaction Management

Abstract

A Service Broker application always must use some kind of locking logic to process messages from a service queue. Service Broker provides a concept referred to as conversation groups for this reason. As soon as you beging working with locking, you must also have a look at transaction management with Service Broker, because transaction management affects the overall performance of your Service Broker application. This chapter will discuss the following two techniques:

• Conversation groups and locks: Service Broker puts messages of related conversations into a so-called conversation group. Within a conversation group, Service Broker ensures things such as ordered message processing, reliable delivery, and synchronization support for multiple queue readers.

• Transaction management: You can design and build scalable Service Broker applications through different approaches in the transaction management. This section will look at several approaches and show you how they affect performance.