Write data to SQL Server directly from BizTalk or use external service?
- by dlongest
An external source will be sending us XML data that BizTalk will pick up and transform into an internal schema. We need this data to be loaded into a SQL Server database as we're going to expose some of the data to our web front-end via a custom WCF service.
The question is: what is the recommended approach for doing something like this? Options we're considering are having BizTalk write to the database directly or having BizTalk call a custom WCF service which would handle the save operation. Another briefly considered idea was having BizTalk write to an MSMQ and have a custom service pull from there and store it in the database.
What are some of the guidelines or questions that should be asked in assessing these options? There are concerns related to overhead from calling the extra service, duplication of efforts if the schema is modified in the future (which it will be to some extent), and simply the best way to design within a service-oriented architecture that we're struggling with.
