Understanding Message Persistence

To take advantage of transactional messaging, the publisher and the AMPS instance work together to ensure that messages are written to persistent storage. AMPS lets the publisher know when the message is persisted, so that the publisher knows that it no longer needs to track the message.

When a publisher publishes a message to AMPS, the publisher assigns each message a unique sequence number. Once the message has been written to persistent storage, AMPS uses the sequence number to acknowledge the message and let the publisher know that the message is persisted. Once AMPS has acknowledged the message, the publisher considers the message published. For safety, AMPS always writes a message to the local transaction log before acknowledging that the message is persisted. If the topic is configured for synchronous replication, all replication destinations have to persist the message before AMPS will acknowledge that the message is persisted.

For efficiency, AMPS may not acknowledge each individual message. Instead, AMPS acknowledges the most recent persisted message to indicate that all previous messages have also been persisted, as described in Acknowledgement Conflation and Publish Acknowledgements. Publishers that need reliable publishing do not wait for acknowledgment to publish more messages. Instead, publishers retain messages that haven't been acknowledged, and republish messages that haven't been acknowledged if failover occurs. The AMPS client libraries include this functionality for persistent messaging (see descriptions of the publish store in client library documentation). See the Guaranteed Publishing section of this guide for further details.