I was reading today a great blog entry by the immensely knowledgeable Richard Seroter about debatching inbound messages from biztalk wcf-sql adapter and was inspired to write some of my own musings on this great new adapter. Today will be transaction scopes.

The WCF SQL adapter allows you to choose to use the "Ambient" transaction or a different one when communicating with the Message Box. This means the adapter can enlist its communication with the Message Box (i.e. submission to BizTalk) in the same DTC as the read from the SQL database where the receive is happening.

The great feature with that is if you go "ambient" and you have no subscriptions set up in BizTalk the records stay in the source database instead of being pulled and simply suspended in BizTalk (the other option). This can be a life saver because a source system may think the records have gone to BizTalk and all is well, but they're getting lost or suspended. Like many great BizTalk adapter features this is runtime configurable; so your operators can decide how they want this to work.

With the new Adapter this is a choice, not a requirement. This is even better. I really like this because it now gives us the option, based on our solution needs, to decide how we handle error situations regarding routing failure exceptions.