As a SQL Server Database Administrator, you will sometimes get a call from a user telling you they saw an error message. You will usually ask what did the message say, and the user will start with “It said something about…” and an error number. If you can get the error number, SQL Server can tell you what the error message actually said.
In this example, we look at error 108:
SELECT message_id, language_id, severity, is_event_logged, text FROM sys.messages WHERE language_id = 1033 and message_id 108;
The different parts have specific usefulness, as this table from Microsoft shows.
|Column name||Data type||Description|
|message_id||int||ID of the message. Is unique across server. Message IDs less than 50000 are system messages.|
|language_id||smallint||Language ID for which the text in text is used, as defined in syslanguages. This is unique for a specified message_id.|
|severity||tinyint||Severity level of the message, between 1 and 25. This is the same for all message languages within a message_id.|
|is_event_logged||bit||1 = Message is event-logged when an error is raised. This is the same for all message languages within a message_id.|
|text||nvarchar(2048)||Text of the message used when the corresponding language_id is active.|