Using Workflow Foundation with EF for message processing - c#

Just wondering if Workflow Foundation is suitable for my problem.
The system will be used to process messages in XML format.
Based on message contents the system can send other messages to related systems or, in case of incomplete data, query them for additional information. Some messages have quite elaborate workflow with multiple states so this is why am I thinking of leveraging WF as then the message processing workflows would be easier to modify and understand due to visual workflow designer
In some cases missing data has to be entered by users manually. ASP.NET MVC application with EF will be used for that.
Is the WF suitable for this task?
I see these possible problems:
Getting all messages that are in certain state;
Editing the messages directly and notifying WF to resume the workflow, possibly even from different step;
WF should not persist the message content within its state and persist/load them from database when needed; In fact I do not think it should persist anything that cannot be changed by EF directly. I guess I would need custom persistence service for that, wouldn't this take too much effort?
Everything must be unit-testable.

Related

Best practice for ServiceBus message versioning

I am setting up a system where we will transport messages between several internal services on ServiceBus Topics. The messages will hold serialized objects. The model objects are defined as quite complex trees of classes. This means it is not practical to maintain duplet versions of the model structures in the code.
We expect the model structure to change so I have exposed the model version as a property on the brokered message.
What is the best way to handle the transition when we need to upgrade the model version?
I don't think we will really need to support two parallell model versions. But I am concerned we don't loose messages during the transition. I assume it is a good strategy to upgrade the sending services first and let all subscribers continue to process messages. When all messages of the previous version are processed, then it is time to upgrade the subscribing services.
What is the best mechanism for skipping messages with a new version that the listening service is currently not handling?
I know I could go back to the old school and define parallell model versions by using schemas for json or xml, thus making it possible for the listening service to handle parallell versions. But that would be cumbersome, so I really want to avoid that.
I noticed the BrokeredMessage has a Defer method. Would that be useful? It looked promising until I realized the messages will be "moved" from the live queue into a separate state where they need to be pulled by referencing them by key. Not practical.
Is it possible to postpone the message by modifying delivery time? A couple of minutes would be fine. If the same service is still running by that time it can be postponed once again. (A working code example would be appreciated!)
Do I need to create separate subscriptions based on model version? So far we allow different message types to travel on the same topic so that would call for some redesign.
As a rule of thumb: upgrades on a live system are difficult. The easiest option that minimises risks of system downtime is:
add next message version support to the current code base
run two message versions concurrently
ensure all versions are supported and system runs without a problem
remove previous version
I have been looking at something similar but am yet to implement it so can't provide full guidance, but to answer your question on #3... I have messages which have a flag to re-queue the message to run again, e.g. to get a process to run every 5 minutes.
So during the process I extract the object from the BrokeredMessage:
var myObject = receivedMessage.GetBody<MyModel>();
I then complete that message to remove it from the queue and create a new BrokeredMessage based on that object and you can then set the ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc field to something in the future.
BrokeredMessage brokeredMsg = new BrokeredMessage(myObject);
brokeredMsg.ScheduledEnqueueTimeUtc = DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(5);
Client.Send(brokeredMsg);
So if you only want to process one model version at a time, you could assign a version number to your Model and code something in to your processor to look for a certain model number. If the model is higher, then re-queue it for a future time (Until you have updated your code). If it is lower (a missed message), then perhaps have some exception handling.
Use custom MessageProperty on message, say Version.
Under SB topic - create new subscription that will accept only messages with new version (using Rules), and modify existing subscription(s) to NOT accept new version messages.
Then you can upgrade senders - new messages will be stored only in new 'temporary' subscription.
After that, you upgrade listeners, change rules on subscriptions (remove version rule from 'main' subscription, disable receive on temporary subscription).
And now you have choice:
using any tool read messages from temporary subscription and write them back to topic - they will arrive to upgraded listeners.
temporarily start one more listener that will read temporary subscription and process all messages in it
other ways, specific to your architecture

Consuming SQL Server data events for messaging purposes

At our organization we have a SQL Server 2005 database and a fair number of database clients: web sites (php, zope, asp.net), rich clients (legacy fox pro). Now we need to pass certain events from the core database with other systems (MongoDb, LDAP and others). Messaging paradigm seems pretty capable of solving this kind of problem. So we decided to use RabbitMQ broker as a middleware.
The problem of consuming events from the database at first seemed to have only two possible solutions:
Poll the database for outgoing messages and pass them to a message broker.
Use triggers on certain tables to pass messages to a broker on the same machine.
I disliked the first idea due to latency issues which arise when periodical execution of sql is involved.
But event-based trigger approach has a problem which seems unsolvable to me at the moment. Consider this scenario:
A row is inserted into a table.
Trigger fires and sends a message (using a CLR Stored Procedure written in C#)
Everything is ok unless transaction which writes data is rolled back. In this case data will be consistent, but the message has already been sent and cannot be rolled back because trigger fires at the moment of writing to the database log, not at the time of transaction commit (which is a correct behaviour of a RDBMS).
I realize now that I'm asking too much of triggers and they are not suitable for tasks other than working with data.
So my questions are:
Has anyone managed to extract data events using triggers?
What other methods of consuming data events can you advise?
Is Query Notification (built on top of Service Broker) suitable in my situation?
Thanks in advance!
Lest first cut out of the of the equation the obvious misfit: Query Notification is not right technology for this, because is designed to address cache invalidation of relatively stable data. With QN you'll only know that table has changed, but you won't be able to know what had changed.
Kudos to you for figuring out why triggers invoking SQLCRL won't work: the consistency is broken on rollback.
So what does work? Consider this: BizTalk Server. In other words, there is an entire business built around this problem space, and solutions are far from trivial (otherwise nobody would buy such products).
You can get quite far though following a few principles:
decoupling. Event based triggers are OK, but do not send the message from the trigger. Aside from the consistency issue on rollback you also have the latency issue of having every DML operation now wait for an external API call (the RabbitMQ send) and the availability issue of the external API call failure (if RabbitMQ is unavailable, your DB is unavailable). The solution is to have the trigger use ordinary tables as queues, the trigger will enqueue a message in the local db queue (ie. will insert into this table) and and external process will service this queue by dequeueing the messages (ie. delete from the table) and forwarding them to RabbitMQ. This decouples the transaction from the RabbitMQ operation (the external process is able to see the message only if the original xact commits), but the cost is some obvious added latency (there is an extra hop involved, the local table acting as a queue).
idempotency. Since RabbitMQ cannot enroll in distributed transactions with the database you cannot guarantee atomicity of the DB operation (the dequeue from local table acting as queue) and the RabbitMQ operation (the send). Either one can succeed when the other failed, and there is simply no way around it w/o explicit distributed transaction enrollment support. Which implies that the application will send duplicate messages every once in a while (usually when things already go bad for some reason). And a quick heads up: enrolling into the act of explicit 'acknowledge' messages and send sequence numbers is a loosing battle as you'll quickly discover that you're reinventing TCP on top of messaging, that road is paved with bodies.
tolerance. For the same reasons as the item above every now in a while a message you believe was sent will never make it. Again, what damage this causes is entirely business specific. The issue is not how to prevent this situation (is almost impossible...) but how to detect this situation, and what to do about it. No silver bullet, I'm afraid.
You do mention in passing Service Broker (the fact that is powering Query Notification is the least interestign aspect of it...). As a messaging platform built into SQL Server which offers Exactly Once In Order delivery guarantees and is fully transacted it would solve all the above pain points (you can SEND from triggers withouth impunity, you can use Activation to solve the latency issue, you'll never see a duplicate or a missing message, there are clear error semantics) and some other pain points I did not mention before (consistency of backup/restore as the data and the messages are on the same unit of storage - the database, cosnsitnecy of HA/DR failover as SSB support both database mirroring and clustering etc). The draw back though is that SSB is only capable of talking to another SSB service, in other words it can only be used to exchange messages between two (or more) SQL Server instances. Any other use requires the parties to use a SQL Server to exchange messages. But if your endpoints are all SQL Server, then consider that there are some large scale deployments using Service Broker. Note that endpoints like php or asp.net can be considered SQL Server endpoints, they are just programming layers on top of the DB API, a different endpoint would, say, the need to send messages from handheld devices (phones) directly to the database (and eve those 99% of the time go through a web service, which means they can reach a SQL Server ultimately). Another consideration is that SSB is geared toward throughput and reliable delivery, not toward low latency. Is definitely not the technology to use to get back the response in a HTTP web request, for instance. IS the technology to use to submit for processing something triggered by a web request.
Remus's answer lays out some sound principals for generating and handling events. You can initiate the pushing of events from a trigger to achieve low latency.
You can achieve everything necessary from a trigger. We will still decouple this into two components: a trigger that generates the events and a local reader that reads the events.
The first component is the trigger.
Make a CLR trigger that prepares what needs to be done when the transaction commits.
Create a System.Transactions.IEnlistmentNotification that always agrees to be prepared, and whose void Commit(System.Transactions.Enlistment) method executes the prepared action.
In the trigger, call System.Transactions.Transaction.Current.EnlistVolatile(enlistmentNotification, System.Transactions.EnlistmentOptions.None)
You'll want your action to be short and sweet, like appending the data to a lockless queue in memory or updating some other state in memory. Don't try to communicate with other machines or processes. Don't write to a disk (if you wanted to write to a disk, just make an ordinary trigger that inserts into a queue table). You'll need to be careful to make sure your assembly is loaded only once so that any shared static state will be unique; this is easiest to do if your static state is in a top level assembly that isn't referenced by other assemblies, so no other assemblies will try to load it.
You will also need to either
initialize your state in such a way that it will be correct even if the system was restarted without sending all the previously queued messages (since a short, in memory queue will not be durable). This means you might be resending messages, so they will need to be idempotent. or
rely on the tolerance of another component to pick up on missed messages
The second component reads the state that is update by the trigger. Make a separate CLR component that reads from your queue or state, and does whatever you need done (like send an idempotent message to a messaging system, record that it was sent, whatever). If this component can fail (hint: it can), you will need some form of tolerance, which may belong in another system. You can achieve low latency by having the trigger signal the second component when new state is available.
One architectural possibility is to have the trigger put the event in memory on commit for another low-latency component to pick up and have the second component send a low-latency, low-reliability copy of an idempotent message. You can pair that with a more reliably or durable messaging system, such as SSB, that will reliably and durably, but with grater latency, send the same idempotent message later.

What C# tools exist for triggering, queueing, prioritizing dependent tasks

I have a C# service application which interacts with a database. It was recently migrated from .NET 2.0 to .NET 4.0 so there are plenty of new tools we could use.
I'm looking for pointers to programming approaches or tools/libraries to handle defining tasks, configuring which tasks they depend on, queueing, prioritizing, cancelling, etc.
There are various types of services:
Data (for retrieving and updating)
Calculation (populate some table with the results of a calculation on the data)
Reporting
These services often depend on one another and are triggered on demand, i.e., a Reporting task, will probably have code within it such as
if (IsSomeDependentCalculationRequired())
PerformDependentCalculation(); // which may trigger further calculations
GenerateRequestedReport();
Also, any Data modification is likely to set the Required flag on some of the Calculation or Reporting services, (so the report could be out of date before it's finished generating). The tasks vary in length from a few seconds to a couple of minutes and are performed within transactions.
This has worked OK up until now, but it is not scaling well. There are fundamental design problems and I am looking to rewrite this part of the code. For instance, if two users request the same report at similar times, the dependent tasks will be executed twice. Also, there's currently no way to cancel a task in progress. It's hard to maintain the dependent tasks, etc..
I'm NOT looking for suggestions on how to implement a fix. Rather I'm looking for pointers to what tools/libraries I would be using for this sort of requirement if I were starting in .NET 4 from scratch. Would this be a good candidate for Windows Workflow? Is this what Futures are for? Are there any other libraries I should look at or books or blog posts I should read?
Edit: What about Rx Reactive Extensions?
I don't think your requirements fit into any of the built-in stuff. Your requirements are too specific for that.
I'd recommend that you build a task queueing infrastructure around a SQL database. Your tasks are pretty long-running (seconds) so you don't need particularly high throughput in the task scheduler. This means you won't encounter performance hurdles. It will actually be a pretty manageable task from a programming perspective.
Probably you should build a windows service or some other process that is continuously polling the database for new tasks or requests. This service can then enforce arbitrary rules on the requested tasks. For example it can detect that a reporting task is already running and not schedule a new computation.
My main point is that your requirements are that specific that you need to use C# code to encode them. You cannot make an existing tool fit your needs. You need the turing completeness of a programming language to do this yourself.
Edit: You should probably separate a task-request from a task-execution. This allows multiple parties to request a refresh of some reports while at the same time only one actual computation is running. Once this single computation is completed all task-requests are marked as completed. When a request is cancelled the execution does not need to be cancelled. Only when the last request is cancelled the task-execution is cancelled as well.
Edit 2: I don't think workflows are the solution. Workflows usually operate separately from each other. But you don't want that. You want to have rules which span multiple tasks/workflows. You would be working against the system with a workflow based model.
Edit 3: A few words about the TPL (Task Parallel Library). You mentioned it ("Futures"). If you want some inspiration on how tasks could work together, how dependencies could be created and how tasks could be composed, look at the Task Parallel Library (in particular the Task and TaskFactory classes). You will find some nice design patterns there because it is very well designed. Here is how you model a sequence of tasks: You call Task.ContinueWith which will register a continuation function as a new task. Here is how you model dependencies: TaskFactory.WhenAll(Task[]) starts a task that only runs when all its input tasks are completed.
BUT: The TPL itself is probably not well suited for you because its task cannot be saved to disk. When you reboot your server or deploy new code, all existing tasks are being cancelled and the process aborted. This is likely to be unacceptable. Please just use the TPL as inspiration. Learn from it what a "task/future" is and how they can be composed. Then implement your own form of tasks.
Does this help?
I would try to use the state machine package stateless to model the workflow. Using a package will provide a consistent way to advance the state of the workflow, across the various services. Each of your services would hold an internal statemachine implementation, and expose methods for advancing it. Stateless will be resposible for triggering actions based on the state of the workflow, and enforce you to explicitly setup the various states that it can be in - this will be particularly useful for maintenance, and it will probably help you understand the domain better.
If you want to solve this fundamental problem properly and in a scalable way, you should probably look as SOA architecture style.
Your services will receive commands and generate events you can handle in order to react on facts happen in your system.
And, yes, there are tools for it. For example NServiceBus is a wonderful tool to build SOA systems.
You can do a SQL data agent to run SQL queries in timed interval. You have to write the application yourself it looks like. Write like a long running program that checks the time and does something. I don't think there is clearcut tools out there to do what you are trying to do. Do C# application, WCF service. data automation can be done in the sql itself.
If I understand you right you want to cache the generated reports and do not the work again. As other commenters have pointed out this can be solved elegantly with multiple Producer/Consumer queues and some caches.
First you enqueue your Report request. Based on the report genration parameters you can check the cache first if a previously generated report is already available and simply return this one. If due to changes in the database the report becomes obsolete you need to take care that the cache is invalidated in a reliable manner.
Now if the report was not generated yet you need need to schedule the report for generation. The report scheduler needs to check if the same report is already beeing generated. If yes register an event to notify you when it is completed and return the report once it is finished. Make sure that you do not access the data via the caching layer since it could produce races (report is generated, data is changed and the finished report would be immediatly discared by the cache leaving noting for you to return).
Or if you do want to prevent to return outdated reports you can let the caching layer become your main data provider which will produce as many reports until one report is generated in time which was not outdated. But be aware that if you have constant changes in your database you might enter an endless loop here by constantly generating invalid reports if the report generation time is longer as the average time between to changes to your db.
As you can see you have plenty of options here without actually talking about .NET, TPL, SQL server. First you need to set your goals how fast/scalable and reliable your system should be then you need to choose the appropriate architecture-design as described above for your particular problem domain. I cannot do it for you because I do not have your full domain know how what is acceptable and what not.
The tricky part is the handover part between different queues with the proper reliability and correctness guarantees. Depending on your specific report generation needs you can put this logic into the cloud or use a single thread by putting all work into the proper queues and work on them concurrently or one by one or something in between.
TPL and SQL server can help there for sure but they are only tools. If used wrongly due to not sufficient experience with the one or the other it might turn out that a different approach (like the usage of only in memory queues and persisted reports on in the file system) is better suited for your problem.
From my current understanding I would not use SQL server to misuse it as a cache but if you want a database I would use something like RavenDB or RaportDB which look stable and much more light weight compared to a full blown SQL server.
But if you already have a SQL server running then go ahead and use it.
I am not sure if I understood you correctly, but you might want to have a look at JAMS Scheduler: http://www.jamsscheduler.com/. It's non-free, but a very good system for scheduling depending tasks and reporting. I have used it with success at my previous company. It's written in .NET and there is a .NET API for it, so you can write your own apps communicating with JAMS. They also have a very good support and are eager to implement new features.

SQL Service Broker vs Custom Queue

I am creating a mass mailer application, where a web application sets up a email template and then queues a bunch of email address for sending. The other side will be a Windows service (or exe) that will poll this queue, picking up the messages for sending.
My question is, what would the advantage be of using SQL Service Broker (or MSMQ) over just creating my own custom queue table?
Everything I'm reading is suggesting I use Service Broker, but I really don't see what the huge advantage over a flat table (that would be a lot simpler to work with for me). For reference the application will be used to send 50,000-100,000 emails almost daily.
Do you know how to implement a queue over a flat table? This is not a silly question, implementing a queue over a table correctly is much harder than it sounds. Queue-like-tables are notoriously deadlock prone and you need to carefully consider the table design and the enqueue and dequeue operations. Also, do you know how to scale your pooling of the table? And how are you goind to handle retries and timeouts (ie. what timers are used for)?
I'm not saying you should use SSB. The lerning curve is very steep and is primarily a distributed applicaiton platform, not a local queueing product so some features, like dialogs, will actually be obstacles for you rather than advantages. I'm just saying that you must consider also the difficulties of flat-table-queues. If you never implemented a flat-table-queue then be warned, there are many dragons under that bridge.
50k-100k messages per day is nothing, is only one message per second. If you want 100k per minute, then we have something to talk about.
If you every need to port to another vendor's database, you will have less problem if you used normal tables.
As you seem to only have one reader and one write from your queue, I would tend to use a standard table until you hit problem. However if you start to feel the need to use “locking hints” etc, that the time to switch to the Service Broker Queues.
I would not use MSMQ, if both the sender and the reader need a database connection to work. MSMQ would be good if the sender did not talk to the database at all, as it lets the sender keep working when the database is down. However having to setup and maintain both the MSMQ and the database is likely to be more work then it is worth for most systems.
For advantages of Service Broker see this link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms166063.aspx
In general we try to use a tool or standard functionality rather than building things ourselves. This lowers the cost and can make upgrading easier.
I know this is old question, but is sufficiently abstract to be relevant for long enough time.
After using both paradigms I would suggest flat table. It is surprisingly scalable and nifty. Correct hints need to be used.
Once the application goes distributed, or starts using mutiple allways on groups with different RW and RO servers, the Service Broker (or any other method of distributed communication) becomes a neccessity.
Flat table
needs only few hints (higly dependent on isolation level) to work scalably and reliably in the consumer (READPAST, UPDLOCK, ROWLOCK)
the order of message processing is not set in stone
the consumer must make sure that the message stays in the queue if the processing fails
needs some polling mechanism (job, CDC (here lies madness :)), external application...)
turn of maintenance jobs and automatic statistics for the table
Service broker
needs extremely overblown "infrastructure" (message types, contracts, services, queues, activation procedures, must be enabled after each server restart, conversations need to be correctly created and dropped...)
is extremely opaque - we have spent ages trying to make it run after it mysteriously stopped working
there is a predefined order of message processing
the tables it uses can cause deadlocks themselfs if SB is overused
is the only way (except for linked servers...) to send messages directly from database on RW server of one HA group to a database that is RO in this HA group (without any external app)
is the only way to send messages between different servers (linked servers are a big NONO (unless they become an YESYES - you know the drill - it depends)) (without any external app)

How to notify a windows service(c#) of a DB Table Change(sql 2005)?

I have a table with a heavy load(many inserts/updates/deletes) in a SQL2005 database. I'd like to do some post processing for all these changes in as close to real time as possible(asynchronously so as not to lock the table in any way). I've looked a number of possible solutions but just can't seem to find that one neat solution that feels right.
The kind of post processing is fairly heavy as well, so much so that the windows listener service is actually going to pass the processing over to a number of machines. However this part of the application is already up and running, completetly asynchronous, and not what I need help with - I just wanted to mention this simply because it affects the design decision in that we couldn't just load up some CLR object in the DB to complete the processing.
So, The simple problem remains: data changes in a table, I want to do some processing in c# code on a remote server.
At present we've come up with using a sql trigger, which executes "xp_cmdshell" to lauch an exe which raises an event which the windows service is listening for. This just feels bad.
However, other solutions I've looked at online feel rather convoluted too. For instance setting up SQLCacheDependancy also involves having to setup Service broker. Another possible solution is to use a CLR trigger, which can call a webservice, but this has so many warnings online about it being a bad way to go about it, especially when performance is critical.
Idealy we wouldn't depnd on the table changes but would rather intercept the call inside our application and notify the service from there, unfortunately though we have some legacy applications making changes to the data too, and monitoring the table is the only centralised place at the moment.
Any help would be most appreciated.
Summary:
Need to respond to table data changes in real time
Performance is critical
High volume of traffic is expected
Polling and scheduled tasks are not an option(or real time)
Implementing service broker too big (but might be only solution?)
CLR code is not yet ruled out, but needs to be perfomant if suggested
Listener / monitor may be remote machine(likely to be same phyisical network)
You really don't have that many ways to detect changes in SQL 2005. You already listed most of them.
Query Notifications. This is the technology that powers SqlDependency and its derivatives, you can read more details on The Mysterious Notification. But QN is designed to invalidate results, not to pro-actively notify change content. You will only know that the table has changes, without knowing what changed. On a busy system this will not work, as the notifications will come pretty much continously.
Log reading. This is what transactional replication uses and is the least intrusive way to detect changes. Unfortunately is only available to internal components. Even if you manage to understand the log format, the problem is that you need support from the engine to mark the log as 'in use' until you read it, or it may be overwritten. Only transactional replication can do this sort of special marking.
Data compare. Rely on timestamp columns to detect changes. Is also pull based, quite intrussive and has problems detecting deletes.
Application Layer. This is the best option in theory, unless there are changes occuring to the data outside the scope of the application, in which case it crumbles. In practice there are always changes occuring outside the scope of the application.
Triggers. Ultimately, this is the only viable option. All change mechanisms based on triggers work the same way, they queue up the change notification to a component that monitors the queue.
There are always suggestions to do a tightly coupled, synchronous notification (via xp_cmdshell, xp_olecreate, CLR, notify with WCF, you name it), but all these schemes fail in practice because they are fundamentally flawed:
- they do not account for transaction consistency and rollbacks
- they introduce availability dependencies (the OLTP system cannot proceed unless the notified component is online)
- they perform horribly as each DML operation has to wait for an RPC call of some form to complete
If the triggers do not actually actively notify the listeners, but only queue up the notifications, there is a problem in monitoring the notifications queue (when I say 'queue', I mean any table that acts as a queue). Monitoring implies pulling for new entries in the queue, which means balancing the frequency of checks correctly with the load of changes, and reacting to load spikes. This is not trivial at all, actually is very difficult. However, there is one statement in SQL server that has the semantics to block, without pulling, until changes become available: WAITFOR(RECEIVE). That means Service Broker. You mentioned SSB several times in your post, but you are, rightfuly so, scared of deploying it because of the big unknown. But the reality is that it is, by far, the best fit for the task you described.
You do not have to deploy a full SSB architecture, where the notificaition is delivered all the way to the remote service (that would require a remote SQL instance anyway, even an Express one). All you need to accomplice is to decouple the moment when the change is detected (the DML trigger) from the moment when the notification is delivered (after the change is commited). For this all you need is a local SSB queue and service. In the trigger you SEND a change notification to the local service. After the original DML transaction commits, the service procedure activates and delivers the notification, using CLR for instance. You can see an example of something similar to this at Asynchronous T-SQL.
If you go down that path there are some tricks you'll need to learn to achieve high troughput and you must understant the concept of ordered delivery of messages in SSB. I reommend you read these links:
Reusing Conversations
Writing Service Broker Procedures
SQL Connections 2007 Demo
About the means to detect changes, SQL 2008 apparently adds new options: Change Data Capture and Change Tracking. I emphasizes 'apparently', since they are not really new technologies. CDC uses log reader and is based on the existing Transactional replication mechanisms. CT uses triggers and is very similar to existing Merge replication mechanisms. They are both intended for occasionally connected systems that need to sync up and hence not appropiate for real-time change notification. They can populate the change tables, but you are left with the task to monitor these tables for changes, which is exactly from where you started.
This could be done in many ways. below method is simple since you dont want to use CLR triggers and sqlcmd options.
Instead of using CLR triggers you can create the normal insert trigger which updates the dedicated tracking table on each insert.
And develop dedicated window service which actively polls on the tracking table and update the remote service if there is any change in the data and set the status in tracking table to done (so it wont be picked again)..
EDIT:
I think Microsoft sync services for ADO.Net can work for you. Check out the below links. It may help you
How to: Use SQL Server Change Tracking - sql server 2008
Use a Custom Change Tracking System - below sql server 2008
In similar circumstances we are using CLR trigger that is writing messages to the queue (MSMQ). Service written in C# is monitoring the queue and doing post-processing.
In our case it is all done on the same server, but you can send those messages directly to the remote queue, on a different machine, totally bypassing "local listener".
The code called from trigger looks like this:
public static void SendMsmqMessage(string queueName, string data)
{
//Define the queue path based on the input parameter.
string QueuePath = String.Format(".\\private$\\{0}", queueName);
try
{
if (!MessageQueue.Exists(QueuePath))
MessageQueue.Create(QueuePath);
//Open the queue with the Send access mode
MessageQueue MSMQueue = new MessageQueue(QueuePath, QueueAccessMode.Send);
//Define the queue message formatting and create message
BinaryMessageFormatter MessageFormatter = new BinaryMessageFormatter();
Message MSMQMessage = new Message(data, MessageFormatter);
MSMQueue.Send(MSMQMessage);
}
catch (Exception x)
{
// async logging: gotta return from the trigger ASAP
System.Threading.ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(new WaitCallback(LogException), x);
}
}
Since you said there're many inserts running on that table, a batch processing could fit better.
Why did just create a scheduled job, which handle new data identified by a flag column, and process data in large chunks?
Use the typical trigger to fire a CLR on the database. This CLR will only start a program remotely using the Win32_Process Class:
http://motevich.blogspot.com/2007/11/execute-program-on-remote-computer.html

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