Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

C.2. Notification Services

Notification Services is an entirely new functional area within SQL Server 2005. Unlike most of the other add-on services, it has little functional use without client-side code done in some .NET language. Think of Notification Services as the convergence of several technologies

The nature of Notification Services is so broad that it is largely beyond the scope of this book. As such, I will not be providing a specific installation example here, which would require an additional configuration definition followed by a special service and client install—all of these before your event was even configured. I will, however, hopefully give you a taste of what Notification Services can be used for so you know whether it is a tool that you need to look into further.

So, what is Notification Services all about? Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's about notifying users or other applications when some "event" has occurred. Since the concept of custom events is supposed, the nature of the events can vary almost as wide as your imagination. Out of the box, however, SQL Server supports three event types:

• Analysis Services events—These are based on MDX queries. This is executed by Notification Services on a scheduled basis, and the results are compared against events that users or other applications have subscribed to.

• T-SQL events—Based on standard T-SQL queries. Like MDX queries, these are executed by Notification Services on a scheduled basis, and the results ...