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Category: Error Handling

Why Use XACT_ABORT?

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush answers a team member’s question:

This came up one day at my work when a developer was using it. I hadn’t used it before and thought I’d better check it out. It’s off by default in SQL server, but why would you use it?

Click through for the tl;dr version, followed by a more thorough explanation. I wouldn’t set XACT_ABORT on by default, but there have been plenty of instances in which I’ve wanted to handle a lengthier series of operations as an all-or-nothing job, and this is a great way to do it.

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Error Handling in Powershell

Published 2025-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer catches ’em all:

Error handling is a critical aspect of writing robust scripts in any programming language. PowerShell provides a powerful structure for handling errors gracefully using try, catch, and finally blocks. These constructs allows us to manage exceptions and ensure that important cleanup actions are performed, even when errors occur. In this blog post, I will show you how to use try catch finally in PowerShell. Let’s jump in.

Click through to see how the logic works in Powershell, as well as how you can read the exception itself in the catch block.

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400 Bad Request when Debugging a Data Factory Pipeline

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck runs into a problem:

I recently had a new pipeline fail. It was actually a copy of an old pipeline where I had made some adjustments into as part of a database migration. When triggered during an execution run, it failed saying some expression could not be parsed. When I went into the pipeline and triggered a debug, it immediately failed with the following helpful error message:

Click through for the error message and how Koen was able to fix the issue.

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Reporting Query Errors via Extended Events

Published 2025-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins wants to know what’s going wrong:

We have an ETL job failing every night . The ETL job is using SQL Server Stored Procedures ,  so we’re looking to be trace the errors reported in SQL Server, to give some clues on how to fix the problem?

Do you have an approach to monitor and save SQL Server  error messages ?

This is an extremely useful way of catching problems in code, as well as people goofing up ad hoc queries.

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Low-Code Tradeoffs and an Example of SFTP

Published 2025-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria talks trade-offs:

Low-code solutions often accelerate development and make tasks accessible to people who can’t or don’t want to write their own code. But it’s important to remember that it’s a trade-off. You are often trading decreased development and maintenance time for limited configuration options and minimal monitoring capabilities. Low-code solutions are great…until they aren’t.

This kind of thing can pop up in code-based libraries or APIs as well, though there’s typically another viable solution. With low-code solutions, veering from the happy path often lands you in a world of frustration.

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Self-Hosted Integration Runtime Reconnecting to Cloud Service

Published 2025-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Nivritti Suste handles an error:

In our organization, most data is stored on-premises with a limited set of less critical data is in the cloud. We use Azure to benefit from the cloud environment and Azure Data Factory (ADF) to move data.

With ADF, there are many components that need to integrate within the environment. The data on our on-premises servers needs to be shifted to the cloud periodically and we use Self-hosted Integration Runtime.

Our developers complain an ADF pipeline is failing with error: ‘The Self-hosted Integration Runtime is offline…’ What does this mean?

Click through for the answer.

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Debugging SSIS Packages

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword wrote code with an error in it:

When constructing or investigating a SSIS package we can run into a variety of issues. To help resolve there are various techniques which can be used to troubleshoot the package.

Whilst we have the Progress tab for the package to tell us what’s happened during execution, it’s usually more effective to debug packages in flight. Below we’ll look at a few ways we can achieve this:

Never having written code that doesn’t work perfectly the first time, this post is, of course, merely academic for all of us perfect developers. But for those people who may have let a little something sneak in or have to deal with the errors that others have seeded into our beautiful programs, Andy provides three separate techniques for troubleshooting packages in flight.

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Step Outputs to Help Troubleshoot Failed SQL Agent Jobs

Published 2025-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jim Evans gives us a reminder:

When troubleshooting SQL Agent jobs, often the Job history output is truncated or poorly formatted, making it hard to read. This is especially true when calling SSIS Packages, running jobs like DBCC CheckDB or when running T-SQL code that returns a lot of output. Are there options to get more readable Job output to aid in troubleshooting?

There are a few settings here that we can use to make troubleshooting SQL Agent jobs a little bit easier. In addition to these, it’s also a good idea to retain more history for longer, especially if you’re not in a position to track those job outputs each day.

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