Using MSMQ when you already have SQL Server and BizTalk

Question

Simple question: Is there any good reason to add MSMQ to an existing messaging framework which already has multiple BizTalk and SQL Server nodes?

Here's the background: We have a messaging framework to process bills, the load is rather low right now (at most 10,000 a day), but it's ramping up. We use BizTalk and SQL Server for all the processing, and we started noticing a few timeouts when inserting (synchronously) into one of the databases (NOT the BizTalk message box). One of our senior programmers suggested we use MSMQ to save (asynchronously) the data that causes the timeout and process it later; the solution he designed works and it's about to be deployed, but I'm still wondering if that was the right decision, considering that we could have used BizTalk itself or SQL Server Service Broker (SSSB). There's a lot of discussions about those three technologies, but they're usually about having to choose one of them over the others, I haven't seen any case of anyone who already had BizTalk and SSSB and decided to add MSMQ to the mix. In our case I think it's an unnecessary addition to our technology stack, but that may be my own bias (and ignorance too), since I know SSSB better and never did anything big with MSMQ. What do you think?

Answer 1

It sounds like you should figure out why your inserts are taking so long, and fix that instead. 10,000 / day is nothing for a decent box running SQL Server.

EDIT:

Adding any sort of asynchronous processing is a form of kicking the can down the road. Assume your inserts take one minute (I realize they probably don't, but for argument's sake). If you make your inserts asynchronous, you can still only handle 1440 inserts per day until you start falling behind. You are always going to need to speed up your inserts eventually.

Now with that said, I don't think that there is any compelling benefit in this case of using MSMQ over SSSB (or vice-versa). It could be argued that with MSMQ you need to hand-code a listener daemon that does your inserts, whereas with SSSB you have that automatically within the database. On the other hand, with MSMQ you are offloading the storage of the messages to another server, potentially offloading some of the immediate stress from your SQL Server.