Blog Post

Wishing For Error Messages That Are Good Search Terms

,

Here’s a SQL error you might get:

not able to access the database “SomeDB” under the current security context.

If you don’t know what the error means (and none of us will understand all the errors we see), you copy/paste it into the search engine of your choice and hope that the “someDB” part doesn’t throw off the search too much. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t (on this one Bing did just a little better than Google). Even if the search engine can figure it out there is still the problem with potentially sending internal names/parameters out of your network – leaking information. One way might be to have a copy option that strips out the parameters for security/ease of search. Thinking about it some more why is that we get answers faster via a search engine than we do via the product? Shouldn’t every error message come with a URL that points back to Microsoft and the most useful sources for that error? Or have we given up on having that kind of catalog and just let the search engine do it instead, trading some amount of accuracy in return for simplicity?

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