How SAP ASE Uses Error Messages

SAP ASE displays an error message when it encounters a problem.

The error message includes:

A message number, which uniquely identifies the error message
A severity level number between 10 and 24, which indicates the type and severity of the problem
An error state number, which allows unique identification of the line of SAP ASE code at which the error was raised
An error message, which tells you what the problem is, and may suggest how to fix it

See the Configuration Guide for your platform for a description of the error log format.

For example, if you try to access a table that does not exist, you see:

select * from publisher

Msg 208, Level 16, State 1: 
publisher not found. Specify owner.objectname or use sp_help to check whether the object exists (sp_help may produce lots of output).

There may be more than one error message for a single query. If there is more than one error in a batch or query, SAP ASE usually reports only the first one. Subsequent errors are reported the next time you execute the batch or query.

Error messages are stored in master..sysmessages, which is updated with each new version of SAP ASE (and has thousands of rows). Here are the first few rows (from an SAP ASE that uses us_english as the default language):

select error, severity, description 
from sysmessages 
where error >=101 and error <=106
and langid is null

error severity description
----- -------- --------------------------------------------------
  101       15 Line %d: SQL syntax error.
  102       15 Incorrect syntax near '%.*s'.
  103       15 The %S_MSG that starts with ’%.*s’ is too long.
               Maximum length is %d.
  104       15 Order-by items must appear in the select-list if
               the statement contains set operators.
  105       15 Unclosed quote before the character string '%.*s'.
  106       16 Too many table names in the query. The maximum
               allowable is %d.

You can query sysmessages to generate a custom list of error messages:

If your server supports more than one language, sysmessages stores each message in each language. The column langid is NULL for us_english and matches the syslanguages.langid for other languages installed on the server.
The sqlstate column stores the SQLSTATE value for error conditions and exceptions defined in ANSI SQL92.
Message numbers 17000 and higher are system procedure error messages and message strings.