Error Handling in T-SQL « SQL Fool

Error handling is one of those things in SQL Server that just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Even a properly constructed stored procedure can still result in error, such as primary key or unique constraint errors.

Why should you care? Consider this real-world example:

You’re a DBA monitoring a well-performing environment. You deploy a new application to production. Suddenly, performance degrades but you do not know why. You look in your error log and see a whole mess of primary key errors. Digging into your newly deployed application, you find that you are now making an extra (and unnecessary) insert to the database, which is resulting in error and causing your performance issues.

This is just one example of many. Fortunately, SQL 2005 has really simplified the error handling process with features such as the Try/Catch block.