SQL Server: verbose error messages?

Question

Is there some configuration option for MS SQL Server which enables more verbose error messages.

Specific example: I would like to see the actual field values of the inserted record which violates a constraint during an insert, to help track down a bug in stored procedures which I haven't been able to reproduce.

Answer 1

I don't believe there is any such option. There are trace flags that give more information about deadlocks, but I've never heard of one that gives more information on a constraint violation.

If you control the application that is causing the crash then extending it's handling (as Jenn suggested) to include parameter values etc. Once you have the parameter values you can get a copy of live setup on a non-live server and start debugging the issue.

For more options, can any of the users affected reliably reproduce the issue? If they can then you might be able to run a profiler trace to capture the actual statements / parameter values being sent to the database. Of course, if you can figure out the steps to reproduce the issue then you can probably use more traditional debugging methods...

You don't say what the constraint is, I'm assuming it is a fairly complex constraint. If so, could it be broken down into several constraints so you can get more of a hint about the problem with the data?

You could also re-write the constraint as a trigger which could then include more information in the error that it raises. Although this would obviously need testing before being deployed to a production server!

Personally, I would go with changing the error handling of the application. It is probably the less risky change.

PS The application that I helped write, and now spend my time supporting, logs quite a lot of data when an unhandled exception occurs. If it is during a save then our data access layer attaches the complete list of all commands that were being run as part of the save transaction including parameter values. This has proved to be invaluable on many occasions, including some when tracking down constraint violations.

Answer 2

In a stored proc, what I do to get better informatino in a complex SP about the errors is take advantage of the fact that table variables are not affected by a rollback. So I put the information I want to use to troubleshoot into table variables at the time I create it and then if I hit the catch block and rollback, after the rollback I insert the data from the table variable into an exception table along with some meta data like the datetime.

With some thought you can design an exception table that will capture what you need from just about any proc (for instance you could concatenate all the input variables into one field, you could put in the step number that failed (of course then you have to assign stepnumbers to a variable) or you could log every step along the awy and then the last one logged is the one it failed on. Belive me when you are looking at troubleshooting a 100 line SP, this can come in handy. If I have dymanic SQl inteh proc, I can log the SQL variable that contains the dynamic code that was run.

The beauty of this is now you don't have to try to reproduce the error, you know what the input parameters were and any other information you find useful. Yes it can take a bit of time to set up once, but once you do it is relatively easy to get in the habit of putting it into any complex proc that you will want to log errors on.

You might also want to set a an nongeneralized one if you want to return spefic data values of a select used for an insert or the result set of a select that would tell you waht what wopuld have been being updated or deleted. Then you would have that only if the proc failed. This is a little more work than the general exception table but may be needed in some complex cases.