A colleague claims BizTalk is slow and should not be used

Question

A colleague claims BizTalk is slow and should not be used. He argues that he has never heard anything positive about BizTalk, that it is slow and that customers using it wants to replace it with something else.

I'm in the planning phase of some datamigration and I wonder if more people feel this way. I find it a bit hard to believe that it should not work properly.

I'm looking into using BizTalk for nightly updating a few million records in Dynamics CRM instead of writing a custom app.

He said "2-3 seconds delay when sending a message from client to somewhere", but in this case he was arguing for the scenario above. It was vague, hence my general question. — Tedd Hansen, Dec 14 '11 at 14:19
Ask your colleague how many black swans he has seen lately. Just because he has not heard anything positive doesn't mean there isn't positive press and positive results from using BizTalk. — Top__Hat, Dec 14 '11 at 15:01

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 14 '11 at 13:25

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BizTalk is very high performance when it comes to throuhgput (messages per second). Latency (time per individual message) is not as high performance, but should be suitable for 90% of scenarios.

However, for a data migration there are much better tools out there, such as SSIS on the microsoft sql stack. BizTalk is about moving small data in real time, not moving large data in a one off

answered Dec 14 '11 at 13:25

tom redfern

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SSIS doesn't seem right for moving data from Windows Message Queue to Dynamics CRM HTTP REST. – Tedd Hansen Dec 14 '11 at 14:17

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 14 '11 at 15:06

I will agree with Hugh on this - Biztalk is very fast if the architecture is correct. You can scale it out and up (since it uses SQL server as the messagebox).

Every time I have seen a "slow" biztalk it is typically the design of the orchestration and a failure to understand the implications of the messagebox.

In terms of a data migration for nightly updates to records using CRM Webservices - if you are just updating programmatically, Biztalk will not really get you any benefits and will cost you time.

A SSIS really will be better. Data Integration/Migration using SQL Integration Services (SSIS) 2008 MSDN BLOG

A colleague claims BizTalk is slow and should not be used

2 Answers2