integrating your business

The new Hotrod magazine issue can be downloaded on the following location: http://biztalkhotrod.com/Documents/Issue8_Q4_2009.pdf

I also noticed that the CODit BizTalk SOA Dashboard is announced again on the last page.  The full article on the CODit SOA Dashboard can be found in the fifth issue: http://biztalkhotrod.com/Documents/BizTalk%20HotRod%20Magazine%20Q1%202009.pdf (starting on page 45)

Happy reading.

Sam

Something that might not be known for a lot of people, is the existance and usage of the following BizTalk system property: BTS.SuppressRoutineFailureDebugInfo.
The usage is described in detail on the following KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935960.

It comes down to the fact that the 'non-resumable Routing Failure Report' messages that exist for debugging purposes can now be suppressed, when this is desired. 
I built a 5-minute demo that tests this functionality.

Demo

After generating a new BizTalk project, I created a very simple XSD schema with two fields:

I also created a new property schema with one MessageBased context property: Country.  This property was used for content based routing in my demo:

In my schema, i promoted the two existing fields to the following corresponding properties:
- LaxRouting (boolean) -> BTS.SuppressRoutineFailureDebugInfo (in referenced GlobalPropertySchemas.dll)
- Country -> CODit.BizTalk.DisableRoutingFailureReport.Country

After deploying this project to my BizTalk Server, I created a receive port with a receive location that uses the standard XMLReceive pipeline:

I also created a send port with the following filter: CODit.BizTalk.DisableRoutingFailureReport.Country == France.

Submitting a message with 'France' as content of the Country field resulted in an output message, as expected and as default behavior.

Submitting a message with 'Greece' (which has no subscriber) and the LaxRouting set to 'false', resulted in the default exception with two suspended messages in the Admin console:

Submitting a message with 'Greece' (which has no subscriber) and the LaxRouting set to 'true', shows the SuppressRoutineFailureDebugInfo property at work.  The result is only one suspended (resumable) message, without the Routing Failure Report.

Consequences
Suppressing the Routing Failure Reports, makes it difficult to debug routing failures.  The context of the message at the time of publication is not available for review.  Also, the extra message is not being added to the Windows event log.

Promoting the property
In this demo, I configured the property, based on a message field value.  In real life scenario's, this will typically be done, by promoting the value in a pipeline component that is doing property promotion, like the CODit Matrix.

Sam Vanhoutte, CODit

At my customer, we had a very strange behavior of the BizTalk environment (2 BTS 2006 R2’s running on a SQL 2005 SP2 cluster).

We had an orchestration that took about 1000 milliseconds to execute at the beginning of our performance test (20000 executions per hour of this orchestration).

After many hours of testing, we started noticing a performance degrade.

After 2-3 hours the orchestration took an average of 2000 milliseconds to execute, after 8 hours already 5000 milliseconds!!! This continued without getting better again.

I did very detailed monitoring of this environment and finally found the problem…

The problem is related to SQL 2005 SP2.  This version of SQL contains a bug, having the TokenAndPerUserStore cache not cleared… As this cache gets bigger and bigger queries take longer and longer to complete (These cache entries are used for cumulative permission checks for queries).

When the response times became high (> 5000 milliseconds after hours of testing), I cleared this cache.  The result was immediate: performance went back to normal!!!

This bug is fixed with a cumulative update package or by installing SP3 of SQL Server.

Last PDC, a very interesting session was given about the future and vision of BizTalk Server.  The content of this session can be downloaded on the following location: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVR15