SQL Server 2005 Notification Services

Timely delivery of key information is crucial in many business solutions. Notification Services is a Microsoft® SQL Server based notification platform. This platform allows developers to quickly create notification service applications and allow users to use these applications to receive personalized information in a timely fashion. It enables automated notification to subscribers by using multiple communication protocols and devices.

Note: Notification Services 2.0 was a downloadable component of SQL Server 2000, and was released in 2002. In SQL Server 2005, Notification Services is integrated into SQL Server.

Notification Services can be used for a wide variety of applications. Even for a consumerapplication which can be used by a brokerage firm to send stock and fund prices based on customer-defined criteria for example let the customer know when his/her stock reaches a certain price.

A Notification Service application is a software layer that sits between an information source (stock server) and the intended recipient (clients of brokerage firm) of that information.Notification Service applications consist of three basic components: events, subscriptions and notification. In a notification service application, events are things happening that customers want to be informed about. Subscriptions are how the users of a Notification Service application tell the system about the type of events that they are interested in. for example, in the stock prices of brokerage firm, a customer might create a subscription to be notified when the price of Microsoft stock climbs over a $150 per share. A Notification is essentially a message that will be sent to the end user that contains the information regarding the event that the user subscribed to. Notifications can be delivered in various formats to a variety of different target devices.

Notification Services supports high-volume applications with thousands of incoming events per minute, millions of subscriptions matched, and thousands of notifications delivered per minute and so the databases server where data is stored and processed, has to be a reliable database server.

SQL Server 2005 Database Engine stores data and processes subscriptions very reliably, with a variety of high-availability technologies, including failover clustering, log shipping, and transactional replication. The database server can be configured to automatically handle hardware failures.