In my line of work, I must have at least a working knowledge of each database management system (DBMS) supported by Esri. Other vendors require near-perfect database administrator (DBA) expertise. This means I am constantly looking at error messages.
Some I have memorized, but there is no way I will ever be able retain all of them in my memory. So, here are some resources I use for looking up the meaning of those vague return codes. What are yours?
I also found this query for SQL Server very useful.
SELECT message_id, severity, text
FROM sys.messages
WHERE language_id = 1033;
Ken G. - Geodata Support Analyst