need direction on SSB replacing existing technology

Hello, I have an existing suite of applications in my company where remote laptop users enter data into a local database instance. There are several different applications with several different databases (some users run application A and C, others run A and B and D, etc). All of this data needs to make its way into both their local databases, and to the front office database. In addition, some of the data goes out of the front office to other end users (supervisors get data from people under them).

Currently, we get the data back and forth by creating text files full of SQL statements that are run on either the end user servers or the main server, and we zip and ftp these SQL Script files back and forth.

I am looking into the benefits of replacing this process with a Service Broker application, but I'm still too much of a newbie to understand how this might work. What should my messages contain? Should they contain the same SQL statements that are currently in the script files, and then a SSB process would grab the SQL and run it? Or should the message types be more specific to each application?

any pointers to articles that go beyond "here's what SSB is" would be appreciated.

matt tagliaferri

Why aren't you considering SQL Server Replication?|||I've used replication for other tasks - I've found it to be a bit difficult to manage and troubleshoot. Ansynchonous messaging seems to most closely match our existing method of sending the data around (scripts via ftp).

matt tag
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Implementing replication on top of Service Broker will require a lot of effort in terms of building the plumbing to read/write data, marshalling/unmarshalling, managing schemas, monitoring, configuration, etc. I'm not sure if it actually helps reduce the problem.

Service Broker is useful when you truely want to build loosely-coupled apps. That is apps that are not bound w.r.t. availability, time, schemas, administrative control, identities, scalability, etc. But it is more general purpose than replication and therefore requires more effort.