THROW vs RAISERROR

Problem: How to raise system error without specifying message, state, level.

Solution: THROW.

Throw is a control flow language which is new error handling functionality introduced in SQL server 2012 and above.

Throw has some good amount of differences between RAISERROR.

RAISERROR statement	THROW statement
If a msg_id is passed to RAISERROR, the ID must be defined in sys.messages.	The error_number parameter does not have to be defined in sys.messages.
The msg_str parameter can contain printf formatting styles.	The message parameter does not accept printf style formatting.
The severity parameter specifies the severity of the exception.	There is no severity parameter. The exception severity is always set to 16.

For all the newer applications THROW should be used for coding efficiency and also benefits from THROW.

Example:

In this article I am going to show you we can use THROW inside a TRY/CATCH block.

Example 1: In this example, I would like to show how we can use throw and show how code executes when there is an exception in the code.

THROW	RAISERROR
BEGIN  BEGIN TRY   SELECT 1 / 0  END TRY  BEGIN CATCH   PRINT 'In catch block.';   THROW;  END CATCH;  PRINT 'still running code' END	BEGIN  BEGIN TRY   SELECT 1 / 0  END TRY  BEGIN CATCH   PRINT 'In catch block.';   RAISERROR ('error',16,1 )  END CATCH;  PRINT 'still running code' END

  

OUTPUT:

THROW                                                           RAISERROR

(0 row(s) affected) In catch block. Msg 8134, Level 16, State 1, Line 3 Divide by zero error encountered.	(0 row(s) affected) In catch block. Msg 50000, Level 16, State 1, Line 9 error (1 row(s) affected) still running code

From the above output we can see that throw stops the execution but raise error still executes the code.

Print statement executes in the case of raise error but throw exits from the code.