SQL Server Service Broker
SQL Server Service Broker provides native support for messaging and queuing applications in the SQL Server Database Engine. This makes it easier for developers to create sophisticated applications that use the Database Engine components to communicate between disparate databases. Developers can use Service Broker to easily build distributed and reliable applications.
Application developers who use Service Broker can distribute data workloads across several databases without programming complex communication and messaging internals. This reduces development and test work because Service Broker handles the communication paths in the context of a conversation. It also improves performance. For example, front-end databases supporting Web sites can record information and send process intensive tasks to queue in back-end databases. Service Broker ensures that all tasks are managed in the context of transactions to assure reliability and technical consistency.
Where is the documentation for Service Broker?
The reference documentation for Service Broker is included in the SQL Server 2012 documentation. This reference documentation includes the following sections:
Data Definition Language (DDL) Statements (Transact-SQL) for CREATE, ALTER, and DROP statements
Service Broker Related Dynamic Management Views (Transact-SQL)
See the previously published documentation for Service Broker concepts and for development and management tasks. This documentation is not reproduced in the SQL Server 2012 documentation due to the small number of changes in Service Broker in SQL Server 2012.
What's new in Service Broker in SQL Server 2012?
Messages can be sent to multiple target services (multicast)
The syntax of the SEND (Transact-SQL) statement has been extended to enable multicast by supporting multiple conversation handles.
Queues expose the message enqueued time
Queues have a new column, message_enqueue_time, that shows how long a message has been in the queue.
Poison message handling can be disabled
The CREATE QUEUE (Transact-SQL) and ALTER QUEUE (Transact-SQL) statements now have the ability to enable or disable poison message handling by adding the clause, POISON_MESSAGE_HANDLING (STATUS = ON | OFF). The catalog view sys.service_queues now has the column is_poison_message_handling_enabled to indicate whether poison message is enabled or disabled.
AlwaysOn support in Service Broker
For more information, see Service Broker with AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server).