Enter the (return of the) DEBUG button (or ALT+F5 if you’re like me and hate buttons… especially buttons that look like the execute button from Query Analyzer… I mean seriously people… ok I get the fact that yes the execute button   has been there since Management Studio 2005 but a green “play” button    always means GO GO GO!!! to me… but I digress…)

Weird how a post about loving something turned into a rant… hmmm perhaps I need to lay off the coffee LOL

You need to make sure that you’re a member of the sysadmin server role… but you’re debugging in DEV so I’m sure that wont be a problem… cause no one ever debugs stuff directly in production… I mean that would be silly hehehe

So let’s work with an example:

OK I think it’s pretty obvious what’s wrong with this query… but let’s say for the sake of just showing off the hotness of debugging in SQL Server 2008 you didn’t know why you didn’t get 10 rows returned and ended up with an endless list of your server name LOL

so put your cursor on:

and hit F9. You should now see the familar breakpoint red circle. Now if you hit ALT-F5 and look at your "Locals" window at the bottom you should see @RowID with no value. hit ALT-F5 again to continue to debug and your code should stop on:

and now you should see @RowID with a value of 0… great… exactly as expected now let’s go through the next loop… hit ALT-F5 again. We now see in our Results window our server name but in the locals window @RowID is still 0. If we hit ALT-F5 a few more times we’ll see our server name continually being returned but @RowID never changing.

So now if we exit out of “debug” mode. (SHIFT-F5) and add the following line of code after the SELECT @@SERVERNAME:

   SET @RowID = @RowID + 1

Code should now look like this:

WHILE @RowID < 10
BEGIN
   SELECT @@SERVERNAME
   SET @RowID = @RowID + 1
END


and if we lather, rinse, and repeat the debugging we should now see in our “Locals” window that @RowID increases by 1 every time we loop through and when it gets to 10 we exit out of our loop and we’re done.

So there you go… a nice easy example of debugging in SQL Server 2008… now this only works in SQL Server 2008 currently, if you try and do this in SQL Server 2005 you’ll get a popup window indicating that the Transact-SQL debugger does not support SQL Server 2005 or earlier versions of SQL Server.

Enjoy!!