Will ASE system defined error number fall into user defined error numbers starting from 20000?

Question

The maximum error number in sysmessages:
select max(error) from master.dbo.sysmessages
ON ASE 15.0.3
column1   
19975     
ON ASE 15.7
select max(error) from master.dbo.sysmessages
column1   
19999

Answer 1

Hi Siddhartha,
I don't expect ASE to start using error numbers in the user-defined range.  I'm part of the group that reviews new messages, and conserving the shrinking pool of available numbers is certainly a concern of ours. We are actually still some ways away from running out of numbers.
The error numbers are actually a concatenation of a major family number (the 100s values)
and minor numbers 0-99 in each family.  There are many families of errors that have unused values, one possibility is that we could use those unused values for errors that don't really belong in that family.   Another thing we can do (though it would have to be in a major release of both open client and ASE) would be to introduce another mechanism that might work just the same as error messages but be called, say, "notifications" or "faults' (though that term is already used by checkstorage.
There actually already exist two such families of messages, one called "errors" and the other called "messages".  You can see this when configuring a shared memory dump, both are possible dump conditions.  "Errors" show up in the errorlog displaying the message number, severity, and a state value, while "Messages" just display text and support has to look up the associated message number in the ASE sourcecode.  (Not all text messages in the log are actual messages like this, some are just text that gets printed that one can't configure a memory dump on.)
Cheers,
-bret