Persistence Concepts
The AppFabric Hosting Services include tools to easily deploy, configure, monitor, and manage composite applications (applications containing WCF and WF services). In order to use AppFabric tools to configure services to use an instance store (also called persistence store), to query for instances in an instance store, or to control and activate workflow service instances persisted in an instance store, you need to register a store provider, query provider, and control provider for that instance store with the AppFabric Hosting Services.
The AppFabric Hosting Services ship with an instance store provider, an instance query provider, and an instance control provider for the SQL Workflow Instance Store (also called SQL Server Instance Store or SQL instance store). The SQL Workflow Instance Store is a feature of the .NET Framework version 4 that enables workflows to persist state information into a SQL Server database. For more details about this feature, see SQL Workflow Instance Store (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167347). The Instance Store, Query, and Control Providers topic in this section provides more details about providers.
The Windows Server AppFabric Configuration Wizard lets you create and initialize a SQL Server persistence store (database). The wizard creates the database if the database does not already exist, and creates all persistence-related artifacts (tables, stored procedures, views, and so on) in the database. The wizard also adds specified Windows groups to SQL Server roles to secure access to the persistence database. See SQL Server Persistence Database and Security Configuration for Persistence Stores for more details.
The AppFabric Hosting Services include a Windows service named AppFabric Workflow Management Service (WMS). The WMS activates workflow service instances in an instance store when the instances become activatable and executes commands stored in the command queue that is maintained in the persistence store. See Workflow Management Service for more information.
The AppFabric Hosting Services ship with IIS Manager extensions and Windows PowerShell cmdlets. These tools let you configure persistence for WCF and WF services, view persisted instances in a persistence store, and control these persistence instances. See Persistence Configuration and Viewing and Controlling Persisted Instances in this section for more information.