Darren Neimke posted a link to some great content today from his colleague Steven Nagy. Steven had done a bunch of posts on getting started with Notification Services.
It's a great set of posts but it's important to get the message out that in the next version of the product, Notification Services isn't just deprecated, it's gone. It isn't wise to use it for any new development work unless you're intending to stay on SQL Server 2005 for the life of your application.
For that reason, I've stopped teaching any notification services material in SQL training classes as well.
Thanks Greg, do you know what we should use instead? I was aware that it was going when I headed down that path, but in the absence of any proper guidance as to what we _should_ be using, I just decided that I'm happy to take the dependancy on SQL2005 – that doesn't preclude us from moving to 2008 for our other SQL stuff.
What were your thoughts on NS? I actually like it from an architectural viewpoint because it allows me to decouple the subscription management and dispatching of alerts from the application's main codebase.
Hi Darren,
Sadly, this part of the product didn't follow the deprecation process. It's just gone. Many of the things you could do with it could be emulated via Service Broker queues but the subscription model in NS was much richer.
Alternately, I hear a lot of people say that some functionality will go into Reporting Services. From what I've seen, that seems to refer to the people in the team, not the product functionality. Reporting Services in 2008 doesn't seem to add anything related to Notification Services.
However, there are some scenarios in which you might have used Notification Services where report subscriptions in Reporting Services could be used. These are available programmatically via web services too.
Regards,
Greg
Thanks for posting this Greg, I had missed this… sigh… So much to learn (and unlearn)