Broker Queue - Move Poisoned Messages to Table

Question

Currently I have a queue that stores merge queries which are run once it is read off the queue. This all works well, and currently if there is an error with the merge the queue will disable and I have to manually remove the message (or fix the merge, as it were).

I was wondering whether it was possible to simply move the poisoned message to a table? The queues run important (and different) merges that must continually run to ensure data is updated. It is not beneficial to me for the queue to, say, become disabled over night and gain a huge backlog.

Is there any way for me to simply push the bad message into a table? I have attempted this myself however I wound up having a TRY...CATCH inside a TRANSACTION, which performs a rollback on the error anyway (thus invoking the 5 rollbacks to disable rule). Most solutions online mention only manually removing the message.

Any suggestions? Is this just a bad idea? If so, why?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The disable-after-5-rollbacks can be switched off by setting POISON_MESSAGE_HANDLING status to OFF in the CREATE/ALTER QUEUE statement. You can then use TRY...CATCH to manually deal with transactions that fail.

Like you I don't find this feature very useful, so almost always turn it off in my applications and deal with problem messages in whatever way seems best.