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I didn't know this, but in BizTalk 2006 and R2 its no longer required to wrap a "call rules" shape in an atomic scope.

In BizTalk 2004 it was required but this is no longer the case. Be careful though, because the atomic scope served to protect the orchestration's processing from the potential problem of an error occuring and a persistence point being reached which will re-run the message which has been passed thru the rules again.

Take a look at your process and decide whether there is any risk of the message being run a second time, if not, save the performance hit if an atomic scope and just use the call rules independently.

Labels: Business Rules Engine

Virtual PC 2007 virtual hard drive files (.VHDs) can grow to very large sizes. The virtual hard drive can be configured to automatically expand when things like service packs are installed and they don't shrink back.

In addition, if you move a VHD file from a FAT32 partition to NTFS it comes with .V01, .V02, etc files, you can join and shrink these as well using the process below.

While storage is not expensive at the moment, if like me you have more than a dozen Virtual PC drives for various reasons or back them up regularly, you can easily eat up a 250 gig drive in no time.

So how do you shrink a .VHD file?

• Install CCLEANER.EXE (http://ccleaner.com) to remove unnecessary files
• Disable hibernation (power options in Control Panel > disable hiberation)
• Defragment your local hard drive that has the VHD files on it
• Start your Virtual PC
• If you have not installed the Virtual PC Additions, do so (File > Virtual Machine Additions)
• Once started, run the “Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso”; to do this, go to the little cd disk icon at the bottom of your Virtual PC and mount the “Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso” file located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions
• Run the Precompactor if it doesn’t start automatically by going into Windows explorer and clicking the CD drive that was created, takes a little while
• Shutdown your Virtual PC
• Run the Virtual Disk Wizard, go to the Virtual PC console > File > Virtual Disk Wizard and choose the "Edit an existing virtual disk" bullet > then Next > Then navigate to the .VHD file > then Next > then select the compact option. This takes a while.
• When done, you should have a smaller VHD

Labels: Virtual PC

A great resource has just been published to support or debunk many of the myths surrounding the configuration of BizTalk databases in a production environment.

Applies To:

• Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and BizTalk Server 2006 R2
• Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 and SQL Server 2000
• BizTalk Server 2004 with SQL Server 2000
• Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.x and 6.x

The article is titled "BizTalk Server Database Optimization" and details techniques for optimizing the infrastructure of a BizTalk Server system. The goal is to increase the throughput and reduce the latency of the system, maximizing performance.

The listed techniques have demonstrated performance gains in throughput (30-300%) and latency reduction (50% or more).

Most of these changed can be scripted and rolled in as part of a general installation process.

All of the techniques in the doc were tested and BizTalk Server performance lab in Redmond.

The document is highly relevant and recommened.

Labels: BizTalk 2004, BizTalk 2006, IIS, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005