—By Roger Wolter

Service Broker is probably the most powerful and least understood new feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Service Broker makes SQL Server a platform for building reliable, distributed asynchronous applications. When combined with other new features for SQL Server 2005 such as common language runtime (CLR) integration and the XML datatype, SQL Server is a serious platform for building data-intensive services and applications.

Service Broker is not just an application platform, however. Because of its asynchronous nature, Service Broker is also an ideal tool for making many database tasks simpler, more efficient, and more robust.

In this chapter, I’ll discuss the internal details of Service Broker and how it works, and I’ll provide some compelling scenarios for using Service Broker in your database applications. I’ll start with the key new feature of Service Broker, the dialog conversation.