Sorry for the late update; I’ve been feverishly working on a new project at work, using SQL Server Service Broker to replace our older interprocess messaging and database notification system.
Service Broker is a very cool piece of technology, and since it leverages the ubiquity of the database (everyone that needs notifications has connections to our server) we can end up eliminating a huge amount of code by implementing it. We’re also likely to gain speed, as it will eliminate the single-point-of-contention queue table and the manual polling logic that we were using before.
I’m almost ready to roll with my second proof-of-concept exercise — this one demonstrating a stripped down version of my proposed architecture. If I can get it to work the way I suspect I can, we’ll be ready to forge full speed ahead to implementation, and eliminate a code structure that ‘s been a thorn in my side for almost 10 years!