Tuesday, May 6, 2008

BizTalk Server 2006 Development with SQL Express 2005 - Job Agent Replacement

BizTalk Server 2006 can be installed with the SQL Express 2005 edition.

I'm currently using SQL Express 2005 for the development purpose because it is free so we don't have to worry about the licensing.

The downside of using SQL Express 2005 is that the job agent is not available anymore, where BizTalk has several clean up jobs which need to run to optimize the database performance.
Usually we don't have to worry about this since we're only using for development or testing purpose, but I'm currently investigating a problem with our singleton orchestration, we suspect that by using a singleton orchestration, some messages were cleaned up in the database after they are completed.

So how to investigate this problem in my local development PC where we don't have running biztalk clean up jobs in SQL Express 2005?
Luckly, I found this article which mentions about SQLScheduler.
It's free and we can have unlimited instances with unlimited jobs :)

I just tried to setup the jobs based on the jobs which were created in SQL Server Instances, and they seems to work fine because the stored procedures for the jobs were created in the SQL Express Database as well.

This is the job details example for MessageBox_Message_Cleanup_BizTalkMsgBoxDb :

Go and give it a try for yourself, it's more than enough for development / testing purpose :)

4 comments:

  1. richard.hurst@kirklees.gov.ukJuly 31, 2009 at 3:20 PM

    I would like to know how you have got BTS to work with SQLExpress

    I have been trying to do it for a while on a development PC and have loads of problems with it

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bembeng ArifinJuly 31, 2009 at 11:33 PM

    Hi Richard,
    Me and 2-3 other colleagues were using SQL Express 2005 for BizTalk 2006 Developer Edition (not R2) for about a year in 2007-2008.
    Honestly, I can't remember whether I encountered any major issues during that time, except for huge database transaction log file due to the unavailability of the the job agent (scheduler) and it's a bit slow as well, but quite sufficient for our development needs.
    What kind of problems are you having btw?
    and which version of sql express and biztalk server are you using?

    ReplyDelete
  3. biztalk developer blogDecember 7, 2011 at 2:16 PM

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    ReplyDelete
  4. Cooper BentleyOctober 10, 2021 at 4:22 AM

    Hi great reading your post

    ReplyDelete