How to call Biztalk orchestrations without using the messagebox

Question

Is there anyway you could call a Biztalk orchestration without placing a message in the messagebox? The point here is to use an orchestration that is stored and configured in Biztalk but avoid the performance loss of using a database to trigger it.

Answer 1

Message box is an integral part of BizTalk server and no transaction can occur without message box. In most cases it works great and having message box provides lots of benefits for message delivery and processing. If you are having performance issues, I would recommend you measure your solution performance and identify bottlenecks. Some key points you can look:

• Orchestration Persistent points
• Use BizTalk host settings and change Polling intervals for messaging and Orchestration to reduce from 500 ms to 50 ms, it does help.
• If message box is a bottleneck (which is usually not the case until your volume is very high) add slave message boxes. BizTalk allows to scale out message box by adding slave message boxes. In this case one message box serves as master and rest others as slaves to process the request. Scale out message box

Answer 2

The answer to the question is NO, but, you are probably laboring under a false assumption.

There is no 'performance loss' due to the MessageBox. If you can prove the MessageBox causes you to miss an SLA, then you should be considering a completely different app platform such as a Windows Service. However, many of us have implemented very low latency apps with BizTalk without issue.

So, unless you SLA approaches the definition of 'real-time', I wouldn't worry about it.