SQL Server Tutorial : Giving information about errors

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/transactions-and-error-handling-in-sql-server at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- In this lesson, you will learn how to use some functions that can give you information about errors. Before learning these functions, let's recall first what happens if we don't surround our code by a TRY...CATCH construct, and we get an error. In the output, we get the complete error with the error number, severity, state, line, and message. However, if we surround the same code by a TRY...CATCH construct it seems that we lost the original error information, getting just what we code in the CATCH block. The information we lost can be useful sometimes. Luckily, we can still retrieve it using some functions in our CATCH blocks. Let's see these functions. The ERROR_NUMBER function returns the number of the error. ERROR_SEVERITY returns the severity of the error. Remember that you can only catch those errors with a severity between 11 and 19. The ERROR_STATE function returns the state of the error. ERROR_LINE returns the number of the line where the error occurred. ERROR_PROCEDURE provides the name of the stored procedure or trigger where the error happened. It returns NULL if the error didn't happen within a stored procedure or a trigger. Finally, the ERROR_MESSAGE function returns the text of the error message. Let's see some examples. In this example, we added to the CATCH block the functions we just explained. We added them using the SELECT statement. If we execute this code, we get the following output. We can see the error number, severity level, error state, error line, and message. Notice that the error procedure is NULL because this block of code is not within any stored procedure or trigger. If we compare this last output with the original error, we can see that the information is the same. The only difference is the