What are the advantages and disadvantages of turning NOCOUNT off in SQL server queries?

Question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of turning NOCOUNT off in SQL server queries? ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Answer 1

I personally like to turn NOCOUNT on for queries that get run in an manual fashion and use a lot of Print statements to output debugging messages. In this way, your output would look less like:

Updating usernames
(287 rows updated)

Done
Updating passwords
(287 rows updated)

Done
Doing the next thing
(1127 rows updated)

Done

And more like

Updating usernames
Done

Updating passwords
Done

Doing the next thing
Done

Depending on the sensitivity of what you're updating, sometimes it is helpful to include the counts; however, for complex scripts with a lot of output I usually like to leave them out.