ActiveMQ or any messaging queue - FIFO requirement - message-queue

Question on messaging queues. I've been reading around for a while (couple of days) on the number of messaging queue products - totally astounding!
I need to have the ability to have FIFO in a queue. and i read that the messaging product guarantee delivery but not FIFO.
Any ideas on possible messaging implementations that guarantee FIFO? Or any other implementation ideas that don't use messaging systems?
Looking forward to hear from you.
Yakult121

ActiveMQ guarrantees the message order of all messages sent by the same producer but also supports total ordering. For an example how to configure total ordering take a look at the documentation:
http://activemq.apache.org/total-ordering.html

Related

Any links to Service Broker best practices?

I am looking for any authoritative articles on Service Broker best practices.
In particular, I am looking for the following topics (I know the answers, but have to find documents that support the knowledge):
queues in the same database
message
size
systems where the message is just a pointer and data is retrieved from tables
instrumentation - auditing Service Broker applications
TIA
systems where the message is just a pointer and data is retrieved from tables
This is not a Service Broker application, is just a queueing application. Service Broker was designed primarily for distributed applications, communication (networking, security, routing, retries) is a major component. If you only send messages as pointers and the data is in tables the distributed nature of SSB falls apart. The litmus test is "can I move my service onto another server and the application continues to work after I fix the routing?". If the answer is Yes then you're using SSB the way it was designed. If is No it meas you're only interested in queues.
The problem with using SSB as a 'dumb queue' is that is a very expensive queue (just think at the extra writes required on each message due to conversations and conversation groups). RECEIVE statement is expensive and basically a black box from optimization pov. You could optimize a table used as a queue a lot better than what you can do with an SSB service/queue. I reckon that SSB has an ace up its sleeves which makes it attractive even when used as a local queue, namely the internal activation capabilities. One may say that activation cannot be replaced with anything else (I agree, it cannot), but one must be aware of the cost and balance the pros and cons.

Locks and batch fetch messages with RabbitMq

I'm trying to use RabbitMq in a more unconventional way (though at this point i can pick any other message queue implementation if needed). Instead of leaving Rabbit push messages to my consumers, the consumer connects to a queue and fetches a batch of N messages (during which it consumes some and possible rejects some), after which it jumps to another queue and so on. This is done for redundancy. If some consumers crash all messages are guaranteed to be consumed by some other consumer.
The problem is that I have multiple consumers and I don't want them to compete over the same queue. Is there a way to guarantee a lock on a queue? If not, can I at least make sure that if 2 consumers are connected to the same queue they don't read the same message? Transactions might help me to some degree but I've heard talk that they'll get removed from RabbitMQ.
Other architectural suggestions are welcomed too.
Thanks!
EDIT:
As pointed in the comment there's an a particularity in how I need to process the messages. They only make sense taken in groups and there's a high probability that related messages are clumped together in a queue. If for example I pull a batch of 100 messages, there's a high probability that I'll be able to do something with messages 1-3, 4-5,6-10 etc. If I fail to find a group for some messages I'll resubmit them to the queue. WorkQueue wouldn't work because it would spread messages from the same group to multiple workers that wouldn't know what to do with them.
Have you had a look at this free online book on Enterprise Integration Patterns?
It sounds like you really need a workflow where you have a batcher component before the messages get to your workers. With RabbitMQ there are two ways to do that. Either use an exchange type (and message format) that can do the batching for you, or have one queue, and a worker that sorts out batches and places each batch on its own queue. The batcher should probably also send a "batch ready" message to a control queue so that a worker can discover the existence of the new batch queue. Once the batch is processed the worker could delete the batch queue.
If you have control over the message format, you might be able to get RabbitMQ to do the batching implicitly in a couple of ways. With a topic exchange, you could make sure that the routing key on each message is of the format work.batchid.something and then a worker that learns of the existence of batch xxyzz would use a binding key like #.xxyzz.# to only consume those messages. No republishing needed.
The other way is to include a batch id in a header and use the newer headers exchange type. Of course you can also implement your own custom exchange types if you are willing to write a small amount of Erlang code.
I do recommend checking the book though, because it gives a better overview of messaging architecture than the typical worker queue concept that most people start with.
Have your consumers pull from just one queue. They will be guaranteed not to share messages (Rabbit will round-robin the messages among the currently-connected consumers) and it's heavily optimized for that exact usage pattern.
It's ready-to-use, out of the box. In the RabbitMQ docs it's called the Work Queue model. One queue, multiple consumers, with none of them sharing anything. It sounds like what you need.
You can set a channel/consumer level prefetch count to consume messages in batches. In order to re-submit messages, you should use the basic.reject AMQP method and those messages can be chosen to be requeued or forwarded to a dead letter queue. Multiple consumers trying to pull messages from the same queue is not an issue asthe AMQP basic.get method will be synchronized to handle concurrent consumers.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rabbitmq-users/hJ8f5du-GCA

Messaging Confusion: Pub/Sub vs Multicast vs Fan Out

I've been evaluating messaging technologies for my company but I've become very confused by the conceptual differences between a few terms:
Pub/Sub vs Multicast vs Fan Out
I am working with the following definitions:
Pub/Sub has publishers delivering a separate copy of each message to
each subscriber which means that the opportunity to guarantee delivery exists
Fan Out has a single queue pushing to all listening
clients.
Multicast just spams out data and if someone is listening
then fine, if not, it doesn't matter. No possibility to guarantee a client definitely gets a message.
Are these definitions right? Or is Pub/Sub the pattern and multicast, direct, fanout etc. ways to acheive the pattern?
I'm trying to work the out-of-the-box RabbitMQ definitions into our architecture but I'm just going around in circles at the moment trying to write the specs for our app.
Please could someone advise me whether I am right?
I'm confused by your choice of three terms to compare. Within RabbitMQ, Fanout and Direct are exchange types. Pub-Sub is a generic messaging pattern but not an exchange type. And you didn't even mention the 3rd and most important Exchange type, namely Topic. In fact, you can implement Fanout behavior on a Topic exchange just by declaring multiple queues with the same binding key. And you can define Direct behavior on a Topic exchange by declaring a Queue with * as the wildcard binding key.
Pub-Sub is generally understood as a pattern in which an application publishes messages which are consumed by several subscribers.
With RabbitMQ/AMQP it is important to remember that messages are always published to exchanges. Then exchanges route to queues. And queues deliver messages to subscribers. The behavior of the exchange is important. In Topic exchanges, the routing key from the publisher is matched up to the binding key from the subscriber in order to make the routing decision. Binding keys can have wildcard patterns which further influences the routing decision. More complicated routing can be done based on the content of message headers using a headers exchange type
RabbitMQ doesn't guarantee delivery of messages but you can get guaranteed delivery by choosing the right options(delivery mode = 2 for persistent msgs), and declaring exchanges and queues in advance of running your application so that messages are not discarded.
Your definitions are pretty much correct. Note that guaranteed delivery is not limited to pub/sub only, and it can be done with fanout too. And yes, pub/sub is a very basic description which can be realized with specific methods like fanout, direct and so on.
There are more messaging patterns which you might find useful. Have a look at Enterprise Integration Patterns for more details.
From an electronic exchange point of view the term “Multicast” means “the message is placed on the wire once” and all client applications that are listening can read the message off the “wire”. Any solution that makes N copies of the message for the N clients is not multicast. In addition to examining the source code one can also use a “sniffer” to determine how many copies of the message is sent over the wire from the messaging system. And yes, multicast messages are a form the UDP protocol message. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast for a general description. About ten years ago, we used the messaging system from TIBCO that supported multicast. See: https://docs.tibco.com/pub/ems_openvms_c_client/8.0.0-june-2013/docs/html/tib_ems_users_guide/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm#context=tib_ems_users_guide&file=EMS.5.091.htm

Choices of Message Queue?

We've been using SysV Message Queue for our distributed data processing system for over 15 years. For some reason, we want to replace it with newer Message Queue mechanism. Is there any suggestions?
Requirements:
Fast response, minimizing message queue system overhead
Multiple client language library support, mainly c, c# and java
Can do some HA configuration to prevent SPOF
Have logging ability to check who sends message and who receives message
I've found Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, but it seems RabbitMQ lacks of stable C client library support?
While I have not used it personally, the toolkit from 0MQ is quite impressive.
It seems to meet all of your criteria, although #4 you would have to implement yourself, but that seems straightforward.
My question back would be why you are moving away from SysV Message Queue? The "for some reason" is a disconcerting statement.
That said, there are many excellent messaging products out there, having a useful set of selection criteria is key.
I would suggest extending your requirements list a bit, then doing website bench-marking against that list. Take the top two or three only, and do some real-world project spikes (or a bake-off if you prefer the term) to give you some actual feedback on which to base your final decision.
Good Luck

Does RabbitMq do round-robin from the exchange to the queues

I am currently evaluating message queue systems and RabbitMq seems like a good candidate, so I'm digging a little more into it.
To give a little context I'm looking to have something like one exchange load balancing the message publishing to multiple queues. I don't want to replicate the messages, so a fanout exchange is not an option.
Also the reason I'm thinking of having multiple queues vs one queue handling the round-robin w/ the consumers, is that I don't want our single point of failure to be at the queue level.
Sounds like I could add some logic on the publisher side to simulate that behavior by editing the routing key and having the appropriate bindings in place. But that's kind of a passive approach that wouldn't take the pace of the message consumption on each queue into account, potentially leading to fill up one queue if the consumer applications for that queue are dead.
I was looking for a more pro-active way from the exchange entity side, that would decide where to send the next message based on each queue size or something of that nature.
I read about Alice and the available RESTful APIs but that seems kind of a heavy duty solution to implement fast routing decisions.
Anyone knows if round-robin between the exchange the queues is feasible w/ RabbitMQ then? Thanks.
Exchanges are generally stateless in the AMQP model, though there have been some recent experiments in stateful exchanges now that there's both a system for managing RabbitMQ plugins and for providing new experimental exchange types.
There's nothing that does quite what you want, I don't think, though I'm not completely sure I understand the requirement. Aside from the single-point-of-failure point, would having a single queue with workers reading from it solve your problem? If so, then your problem reduces to configuring RabbitMQ in an HA configuration that permits you to use that solution. There are a couple of approaches to doing that: either use HALinux and a shared store to get active/passive HA with quick failover, or set up more than one parallel broker and deduplicate on the client, perhaps using redis or similar to do so.
I suggest asking your question again on the rabbitmq-discuss mailing list, where more people will be able to offer suggestions, and where the discussion can be archived for posterity.
Agree with Tony on the approach.
Here is a 'mashup' of RabbitMQ, Redis that you could use instead of rolling your own -
http://xing.github.com/beetle/
One built in way you can do a form of sharing a form exchange to queues, but not exactly round robin, is Consistent Hashing. rabbitmq_consistent_hash_exchange
How too
https://medium.com/#eranda/rabbitmq-x-consistent-hashing-with-wso2-esb-27479b8d1d21
Paper to explain, it puts queues at a weighted distribution on a circle and then by sending random routing key it will send to the closest queue.
http://www8.org/w8-papers/2a-webserver/caching/paper2.html