BizTalk Benchmark Wizard Released

One of the most common questions I get asked when looking at a BizTalk server project is what type of hardware is required and how many servers are needed.

This is often a black art.

Microsoft has stepped in to help with the release of a BizTalk Benchmark Wizard:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/biztalk/ee946766.aspx

Basically this tool is intended to work along side the BizTalk Server 2009 Scale-Out Testing Study:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee377068(BTS.10).aspx

Comparing the results of the study to your own running production environment can provide valuable insight into the performance of a BizTalk server farm and point to places where optimization is needed

BizTalk 2009 and SQL 2008 - Simple recovery mode breaks agent

I learned something today about SQL 2008 and BizTalk's SQL agent jobs. You must leave all BizTalk databases recovery model to "Full". I encounted a database set with the recovery model that was changed to "Simple" and it caused the agent's jobs to fail.

The reason for this is that "TRUNCATE_ONLY" has been deprecated for SQL Server 2008. This flag forces you to keep the recovery model as full. When I changed it back everything began funtioning normally again.

How to solve "Unable to determine if the owner has server access" error

This error message popped up all of a sudden during a load test with heavy volume.

Turns out to be a well known culprit to lots of BizTalk errors: the SQL Agent jobs were not running. Since we had just deployed to a test environment, and it was a new server, I didn't check to the Agent to see if it was running.

When I teach the class, I always mention this check, so I didn't follow my own advice. Anyway, the database server logs grew wildly and caused a shutdown.

When I configured and ran the jobs everything was fine, but it took a while for everything to complete.

Where Do I Create a Web Reference in BizTalk 2009?

If you are reading this, most likely you were just as stumped as I was when I tried to create my first web reference in BizTalk 2009.

I assumed "Web Reference" was renamed to "Service Reference" but I quickly realized that something was wrong when I tried to create a message within an orchestration and had nothing listed within the "Web Message Types" section.

Well, to create a traditional Web Reference in BizTalk 2009 you have to take an extra step:

Right click on the project, and select "Add Service Reference" just as you did before, but this time, at the bottom click "Advanced". At the bottom of that screen click "Add Web Reference" which will take you to the web reference screen we recognize from previous BizTalk versions.

BizTalk 2009 Beta Documentation Now Available

Beta documentation for BizTalk 2009 is now available to download from the Microsoft.com website:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=38923F29-167F-497D-80A5-899602FEF8D7&displaylang=en

BizTalk 2009 Database Diagram Now Available

The BizTalk 2009 product development team has released a pdf diagram of the structure of the BizTalk 2009 databases. You can download yourself a copy at the link below.

BizTalk 2009 Database Diagram PDF

New Features in BizTalk 2009

Details about the upcoming release of BizTalk 2009 are emerging. The new version was initially to be called BizTalk 2006 R3 but the development team felt that it was a significant enough step forward to warrant an change of the product name.

Among the highlights of the new release are:

• Support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and also the .NET Framework 3.5
• Support for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V which is a much higher performance platform for creating virtual machines
• BizTalk 2009 takes advantage of Windows Server 2008 clustering so you can now deploy BizTalk Server so cluster nodes could reside on separate IP subnets and avoid complicated VLANs
• BizTalk Server 2009 includes a UDDI 3.0 registry which provides support for registry affiliation, extended discovery services, digital certificates and extensibility for a subscription API
• New Line of Business Adapters are introduced for Oracle E-Business Suites and SQL Server
• Additional performance improvements have been made to the existing set of adapters
• Enhanced Business Activity Monitoring- By expanding the out of the box BAM functionality with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, BizTalk Server 2009 provides support for UDM cubes and scalable real-time aggregations which enhances support for Microsoft PerformancePoint Server 2007
• ESB Guidance 2.0 delivers updated prescriptive guidance for applying ESB usage patterns
• Enhanced Support for EDI and AS2 Protocols
• BizTalk Server 2009 updates all message schemas and business rules for compliance with SWIFTReady Financial EAI Gold certification
• New Mobile RFID Platform and device management
• New RFID industry standards support for LLRP, TDT, TDS, WS Discovery and partial EPCIS support
• BizTalk Server 2009 improves recoverable interchange processing of validation failures by providing support for recoverable interchange processing
• The WCF Adapter has been enhanced to provide support for configurable transactions and the ability to choose the transaction isolation level in the WCF-Custom Send Adapter.

"BizTalk 2009" Announced

This month, Microsoft has announced the upcoming release of BizTalk Server 2009 coupled with plans for future releases.

Originally the next release of BizTalk was slated to be named BizTalk Server R3 but has been renamed “BizTalk Server 2009”. Microsoft wanted everyone to make sure it was understood that this is a full product release with new and enhanced capabilities and updated platform support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, and the .NET Framework 3.5.

A CTP release is expected by the end of this year. The formal release date is expected to be around June of ‘09.

Microsoft also plans to maintain a rhythm of BizTalk releases every 2 years.