Deborah Melkin builds a report query:
I’ve been doing a lot of work recently where I have long running processes where I need to have visibility on where we are during the process as well as being able to provide a report we can use to find out if there were any errors, how long each step took, and other useful information that we can use later. My solution was to create an audit log table where I simply added a row before and after each step, recording the information I had available. When the processes are done, I create a query to run over the table returning the values I want to see.
Deb also throws in the only ordered set function in SQL Server, STRING_AGG().