Creating partitioned Service Application

Question

I'm looking for best practices on setting up partitioned service applications in SharePoint. Not the default ones, but a custom one.

As I understand, a partitioned service application like the profile service still uses the same DB as the normal service app does. Only in most tables, the records get an extra identifier in the form of a partitionID key.

So suppose I want to make my own service application with it's own DB. It'll be used in a partitioned environment, so I need to include the partition ID in the tables where that's applicable. Is this just a matter of including a Guid column in each table and including the same Guid in my service methods? Or are there more options on creating service proxy objects to automatically include the partion id in each client call? Does anyone have any experience with this kind of setup?

Answer 1

If you run the Get-Member cmdlet against the new-spservice commands (New-SPProfileSerivce, etc that have the -PartionMode flag), you will notice it is not one of the members / methods returned. Additionally there a switch used in the Install-SPService cmdlet that will provision the service during install (this is the cmdlet used for installing custom services), but there is nothing for Partitions.

Service Applications Visual How-To: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg543112.aspx#Y600

Service Applications WebCast: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/gg620670

Service Application Background: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc768569.aspx

Application Framework: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee536537.aspx

Administering Services with PowerShell http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537913.aspx