What if there was a new platform for .NET that has the following characteristics
well there is one - it is made by Microsoft and goes by the name SQL Server 2005.
SQL Server 2005 lets you run .NET 2.0 code in process (an interesting point here is that DB2 already lets you run .NET code and Oracle will also add this capability with 10g Release 2 but both do it out-of-process).
It also lets you expose stored procedures as web-services
It has a performant message queuing mechanism called service-broker. Service broker guarantees message ordering as well as solves the problem of multiple readers (what happens if one reader takes the order header and another takes the order line) and as I said it has good performance. by the way Roger Walter who is the group program manager for service broker is going to publish a book on the subject. Having worked with him for a short while (He was our "Redmond connection" on one of the projects I consulted) I can say without hesitation that he is the authority on service broker and a smart guy to boot :)
SQL Server 2005 also has (almost) instant fail-over capability - using Database mirroring you can have your (application?) server fail over in less than 5 seconds (compare that with clustering fail over times of 60 seconds or more). Note that each database can only fail over to one other database, but a server can be both the backup database of one server and the active server (vs. another server).
And you get all the management capabilities of SQL server (oh yeah, you also have a great DB there :) )
Taking all this into consideration there are (a limited set of) situations where you can actually use SQL Server as a hosting platform (instead of COM+ or IIS) for your application. True, this is not something I will generally recommend but I can think of one or two projects where scale-out was less of an issue where it could have been used (had it existed).
Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: