Channel 9 Forums - Tech Off - SQL Notification Services

Tech Off - SQL Notification Services

themaffeo — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 04:36:53 GMT

I'm not sure if this is 'hard-hat' enough, but here goes.

I was doing some work with the Speech Application Framework when I ran into Sql Notification services.

I got a little excited about it, installed it and ran thorugh the tutorials. Around lesson 8 or so I was becoming underwhelmed. It seemed like a large amount of work to simply raise database driven events.

I've come to notice that whenever I'm 'underwhelmed' with something, its usually that I'm missing something.

Have any of you used SQl Notificaton servies? If so, how have you found it useful? Compared to rolling your own solution?

Tech Off - SQL Notification Services

RobKeiser — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 15:47:56 GMT

We used it in a project about a year ago. I'd say that the tutorials are not the best.

We used it in a workflow scenario. People who where interested in following a contract through the workflow were automatically subscribed to the contract (interested meant that they were either creating the contract, had to approve the contract, or were a manager of the people who created or approved them).

Whenever the contacts state changed we fired an event - but we didn't want and e-mail to go out whenever the state changed (the users would see it as just more spam) so we collected all the state changes and put them into an e-mail that went out between 12 midnight and 3am. When they came in in the morning the people had a list of contacts they had to approve and also a list of the people who were holding up the process. The e-mail's were all html formatted using an xslt file.

We also had notifications that went out that directly affect a particular user. If they were next in line for the contract they were notified.

We had not quite gotten to the point of using alternate forms of notifications, but we could have added it pretty quickly once we got the e-mail notifications working.

My overall impression was that it was quite a bit of work to get this setup, but once it was it worked pretty flawlessly.

Rolling our own was certainly possible, but it would have taken much longer to test it.

Tech Off - SQL Notification Services

ktegels — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 04:12:31 GMT

It should be a lot easier in SS2K5 and know Tony Mann is working on a Notification Services book that should help shorten the runway.