THROW defaults

  • TomThomson (10/6/2014)


    Nice question. But the answer turned up in comments on last weeks raiserror question, so it was a bit easy for anyone who had read that.

    I didn`t read that, yet managed to answer the question correctly cause it was in my mind, had read it somwhere sometime 🙂

    Thanks & Best Regards,
    Hany Helmy
    SQL Server Database Consultant

  • Another good question and informative as well, thanx.

    Thanks & Best Regards,
    Hany Helmy
    SQL Server Database Consultant

  • Jim_K (10/6/2014)


    The raiserror documentation says to prefer throw, but it's less capable.

    The major advantage of THROW over RAISERROR is true support for "re-raising" errors, which is aligned with the TRY/CATCH constructs in languages like Java and C#.

    Consider the case when your insert statement encounters a primary key violation, an error with id 2627. In your stored procedure this PK error transfers control to your catch block. To signal the original caller that a PK error occurred in SQL 2005-2008 R2 we are compelled to write code similar to this:

    BEGIN TRY

    -- do some stuff...until you encounter a PK error with error ID 2627

    END TRY

    BEGIN CATCH

    DECLARE @err_str VARCHAR(2048),

    @err_sev INT,

    @err_state INT ;

    SELECT @err_str = ERROR_MESSAGE() + N' (Line ' + ISNULL(CAST(ERROR_LINE() AS NVARCHAR(11)), N'(null)') + N')',

    @err_sev = ERROR_SEVERITY(),

    @err_state = ERROR_STATE() ;

    RAISERROR(@err_str, @err_sev, @err_state) ;

    END CATCH

    When RAISERROR is executed within the catch block the error message id will be reported to the caller as 50000, the default user-defined error message id, because we are not permitted to raise errors with a message id < 13000.

    In SQL 2012 and higher we can write code like this:

    BEGIN TRY

    -- do some stuff...until you encounter a PK error with error ID 2627

    END TRY

    BEGIN CATCH

    -- much cleaner, more effective exception handling code (in my opinion)

    IF ERROR_NUMBER() = 50100

    BEGIN

    -- user-defined error 50100 encountered

    -- perform some custom logging or recovery logic here to handle error 50100

    END

    -- (re)throw the original error to the caller. in the case of error 2627, a

    -- PK error, the caller will see that exact error as if there were no catch

    -- block in place which was not possible prior to THROW being added to SQL 2012

    THROW;

    END CATCH

    There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
    --Plato

  • +1 great question. Thanks.

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