title: Using MSMQ when you already have SQL Server and BizTalk
body: <p>Simple question: Is there any good reason to add MSMQ to an existing messaging framework which already has multiple BizTalk and SQL Server nodes?</p>
  
  <p>Here's the background: We have a messaging framework to process bills, the load is rather low right now (at most 10,000 a day), but it's ramping up. We use BizTalk and SQL Server for all the processing, and we started noticing a few timeouts when inserting (synchronously) into one of the databases (NOT the BizTalk message box). One of our senior programmers suggested we use MSMQ to save (asynchronously) the data that causes the timeout and process it later; the solution he designed works and it's about to be deployed, but I'm still wondering if that was the right decision, considering that we could have used BizTalk itself or SQL Server Service Broker (SSSB). There's a lot of discussions about those three technologies, but they're usually about having to choose one of them over the others, I haven't seen any case of anyone who already had BizTalk and SSSB and decided to add MSMQ to the mix. In our case I think it's an unnecessary addition to our technology stack, but that may be my own bias (and ignorance too), since I know SSSB better and never did anything big with MSMQ. What do you think?</p>