Summary

In today's business climate, timely information can attract customers, increase employee productivity, and enable agile decision making. In cases where the availability of information is unpredictable, consumers, information workers, and businesses are increasingly choosing to have information pushed to them directly from trusted sources, rather than having to find it themselves. They want information to reach them when it's most useful, wherever they might be, on whatever device they may have with them.

Enabling this kind of rich, personalized information delivery requires a publish-subscribe system. The key component of any publish-subscribe system is the notification application that gathers incoming information, determines which subscribers want to see it, and generates notifications for those subscribers.

Building a notification application from scratch is a task riddled with difficulties. Scalability, reliability, security, and privacy present big challenges, and building the rich features required to truly satisfy customers can consume the bulk of the development schedule.

SQL-NS is a platform for building and executing rich, scalable notification applications. It can greatly reduce the time to market for your notification applications because it does much of the difficult work for you. SQL-NS is an integrated part of SQL Server 2005. If you're building a notification application, you should invest the time to learn SQL-NS.