What's New (Service Broker)

This release of SQL Server Service Broker includes the following:

  • Support for conversation priorities

  • A new command prompt utility to diagnose Service Broker configurations and conversations

  • A new performance object and counters

  • Support for Service Broker in SQL Server Management Studio

  • New tutorials.

New Conversation Priorities

Conversation priorities let administrators and developers specify that messages for important Service Broker conversations are sent and received before messages from less important conversations. This ensures that low priority work does not block higher priority work. Service Broker systems can be configured to offer varying levels of service. For more information, see Conversation Priorities.

New Diagnostic Utility

The ssbdiagnose utility analyzes the configuration between two Service Broker services, or for a single service. The utility also analyzes running conversations for errors. If a running conversation encounters errors, ssbdiagnose analyzes the Service Broker configuration that is used by the conversation. Errors are reported either in the command prompt window as human-readable text, or as formatted XML that can be redirected to a file or another program. For more information, see ssbdiagnose Utility.

New Service Broker Elements in Object Explorer

Conversation priorities have been added to the SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer hierarchy. Existing Service Broker objects have additional right-click menu items, including Properties menu items. For more information, see Service Broker Object Properties F1 Help.

New System Monitor Object and Counters

The Broker TO Statistics performance object reports how often Service Broker dialogs request transmission objects and how often inactive transmission objects are written to work tables in tempdb. For more information, see SQL Server, Broker TO Statistics Object.

The folloing five new counters have been added to the Broker Statistics performance object:

  • Activation Errors Total

  • Corrupted Messages Total

  • Dequeued TransmissionQ Msgs/sec

  • Dropped Messages Total

  • Enqueued TransmissionQ Msgs/sec

For more information, see SQL Server, Broker Statistics Object.

New Service Broker Tutorials

Three Service Broker tutorials have been added to illustrate the steps that are required to set up simple request-reply conversations with three scopes:

  • The initiator and target services are in the same database.

  • The initiator and target services are in separate databases in the same instance of the Database Engine.

  • The initiator and target services are in separate instances.

There is also an Activation tutorial that illustrates the steps that are required to configure an activation stored procedure to receive messages from a queue. For more information, see Service Broker Tutorials.