Thanks for the "warm fuzzies" and facts on the plight (or lack of, I should say) of RAISERROR especially considering the name of this article. I finally had the time to go check the deprecation list for 2k12 and I'm very happy to see that it's not on there except for the () problem.

I'm still going to write an article about RAISERROR and some of the nifty things you can do with it without getting into sys. Messages. I just don't trust MS much when they say things in their official BOL documentation like "New applications should use THROW instead" ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178592.aspx )regardless of context. They said similar about sp_MakeWebTask way back in 2k when SSRS was nothing but an addon. If no one has already done it, I'll still open a CONNECT item to suggest that they really need to add some functionality like being able to supply an optional severity level, etc. :Whistling: