Debugging in SQL Management Studio
One common frustration is trying to debug SQL queries using the built-in editor within Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Management Studio. The database will kindly inform you of any errors when you attempt to execute a query, and also provide a line number. But that’s about it.
Compared to the error highlighting features available in Visual Studio, its hard to imagine that Management Studio is developed by the same company.
For example take the following error:
Example of Sql Error
The editor informs me that I have two errors, one on Line 4 and another on Line 2. But here’s the thing – if I go to line 2 or 4 of my script, I find nothing pertaining to the error. So what’s going on?
The query parser conveniently restarts counting line numbers whenever it encounters a code block, so anything in between a BEGIN and END statement, starts at line 0 again. If you have multiple code blocks in a script, then line numbers are completely useless.
So how do you find out which line is actually causing the error?
In the most poorly designed way ever imagined, Microsoft has graciously decided to help you out by allowing you to double click on those error messages and be taken to the exact part of your code that is causing the error.
And then that leads one to wonder – if there is some way for this double-click function to map the error message to the actually line number in the editor, then why isn’t this function used to display the “real” line numbers for error messages, as opposed to the completely useless line numbers that are shown now?
Considering the amount of money organizations spend on SQL Server, I find this type of design short-sighted.
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