We are getting ready to go live with an (expected) large volume public facing site for the very large retail company where I work.

I had to select a queuing technology, and ended up with SQL Service broker, mainly because you can do point-in-time recovery along with your databases, which is very handy, and also because we have a clustered SQL Server, so we get clustered queues for free. And its ability to have conversations makes it very handy to have items in a conversation processed sequentially while other conversations are processed by other threads in my processing application.

We use it to queue logging messages, as well as delayed writes and all sorts of workflow related messages.

It is a complex product to implement, and there are very few resources on it, although with a bit of digging I did find enough info and tools to get my development done. And it is very solid.

My main gripe with the product is that it disables the queue after 5 consecutive rolled back reads. Also, the requirement to manually close conversations is onerous. It would be nice if conversations could be automatically closed as an option, when the last message in a conversation has been read.