Using Temporary Stored Procedures to Output Common Messages

Louis Davidson shows a neat use for temporary stored procedures:

On another connection (on another computer for that matter), I am right no doing some pretty long loads of some test data. The script is comprised of 6 queries, and they each may take 10 minutes (not completely sure, this is my first run of the scripts). And of course, I want to get some feedback on these queries to know how long they are taking.

One common way to do this is to put a PRINT statement between the queries so you can see the progress. But PRINT statements are notorious for one thing. Caching the output until the output buffer reaches some level.

One addition I’d make to Louis’s post is to make use of the FORMATMESSAGE() functionality that SQL Server 2016 introduced. This use case is right in its wheelhouse.

    SET @message = FORMATMESSAGE(N'%s%s%s%s',
			@Message,
			CASE
				WHEN @AddTimeToMessageFlag = 1 THEN CONCAT(N' : Message Time - ', SYSDATETIME())
				ELSE N''
			END,
			CASE
				WHEN @AddSpidToMessageFlag = 1 THEN CONCAT(N' : ProcessId - ', @@spid)
				ELSE N''
			END,
			CASE
				WHEN @AddOriginalLoginToOutputFlag = 1 THEN CONCAT(N' : LoggedInUserId - ', original_login())
				ELSE N''
			END); 

FORMATMESSAGE() provides a moderate benefit to readability versus a lengthy CONCAT(). And if you always wanted to emit all fields versus the optional setup that Louis has in place, FORMATMESSAGE() makes the result even clearer to understand.

SET @message = FORMATMESSAGE(N'%s : Message Time - %s : ProcessId - %i : LoggedInuserId - %s',
			@Message,
			CAST(SYSDATETIME() AS NVARCHAR(100)),
			@@spid,
			original_login());