Is SQl Service broker what I need?

Hi,

I am looking at the Service Broker as a way to notify multiple clients that there has been data changed on a table in the shared database. These clients may or may not be online. When there is a change, the notification should fire off a query to refresh the clients local cache. Is this a situation where Service Broker would help me? Can multiple clients recieve the notification at different times ( some recieve while online, some recieve when they come back online)? Any help on this would be appreciated. It seems from what I read that the messages are pulled off the queue when a notification has taken place. Is this correct? If so, can I set it to behave differently?

Thanks,

-paul

Service Broker could be used here, but I don't know if you necessarily need to use it here. It sounds like you just need to update some data for a client(s) to have available when they need it. In this case, just write some stored procedures or use a job to to make sure the data gets updated. The benefits of Service Broker is that it allows you to perform actions asynchronously and reliably, which leads to allowing you to build really scalable applications. Have you looked at some type of merge or transactional replication as an option for what you are doing? How many clients are you trying to alert? Why are you updating a local set of data for them rather than having them connect to the central database?

tim