Best Practices - Stored Procedure Logging

Question

If you have a long running SP, do you log somehow its actions or just wait for this message?

\"Command(s) completed successfully.\"

Answer 1

In order to see how long things are taking, and how many rows the previous action modified, I add the current date + time and the last row count to every entry. I use this procedure:

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.[Log]
    @Message NVARCHAR(512),
    @RowCount INT = null OUTPUT,
    @Delimiter NCHAR(1) = N' ',
    @PadChar NCHAR(1) = N'-'
AS
    BEGIN
        SET @RowCount = @@ROWCOUNT;

        DECLARE @LogDate AS NVARCHAR(50);
        DECLARE @RowCountPadded AS NCHAR(8);

        SET @LogDate = CONVERT(NVARCHAR(50),GETDATE(),121);
        SELECT @RowCountPadded = CASE @RowCount WHEN 0 THEN REPLICATE(@PadChar,8) ELSE REPLACE(STR(@RowCount, 8), SPACE(1), @PadChar) END; 

        SET @Message = @LogDate + @Delimiter + @RowCountPadded + @Delimiter + @Message;
        RAISERROR (@Message, 0, 1) WITH NOWAIT;
    END

So, in your procedures, add log output like this:

EXEC dbo.[Log] 'the message';

It produces this:

2012-12-28 11:28:25.197 -------- the message

Had you performed some action previously, you'd see the row count where the dashes are. If you needed the row count for something else (e.g. to log to a table), you can get it back from the procedure as an OUTPUT parameter.

UPDATE: Use this gist if you want to create this procedure once and use it everywhere.

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