yea the error messages are pretty good. but when you're training the greenest of the green you can't necessarily expect them to understand what converting a char value to datetime value resulted in an out of range datetime value on line 17 means!

I attended an SQL training course and one of the candidates after a whole week still couldnt understand why you would use SQL Server and not Excel.

Another candidate failed to comprehend the difference between char and nchar.

Any capable/experienced programmer can (in my opinion) pick up an error message from any compiler/optimiser and work out from reading it what the error is likely to be related to even if they have never used that language before.

Day 1 newbies to programming etc cannot be expected to work out anything for themselves so I recon this article could be very helpful to anyone who has to train a room full of newbies all crowing that the query doesnt work.

My 2p 🙂