FIX: Failed Documents Are Sent to the Suspended Queue Instead of the Retry Queue

When a connection to SQL Server fails, BizTalk Server sends documents that are being processed to the Suspended queue.

If a server failure occurs and BizTalk transactions are aborted, BizTalk automatically moves all of the items that are being processed into the Suspended queue. This occurs to prevent redundant document processing ("double pumping") of documents that are sent through unreliable transports, such as HTTP or File.

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article. This problem was first corrected in Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 Service Pack 1.

BizTalk Messaging Server now supports "at least once" semantics. With the updated files installed (see the Resolution section), if the system experiences a catastrophic failure after it sends a document for processing, but before the document is deleted from the Work queue, the document is sent to the Retry queue when a reliable transport is used. However, if an unreliable transport (such as HTTP or File) is used, the document may be "double pumped" or processed more than once.

With this functionality, BizTalk Server can handle SQL failovers without disabling receive functions or placing documents into the Suspended queue.

After you install this fix, you must run CleanQueuesPatch.sql from the SQL Server Query Analyzer for the fix to work correctly.