How to get description of database mirroring state

Question

I've set up alerts on my SQL server to alert me when the mirroring state of any of my mirrored databases changes, as per this article.

It's all working fine but I was wondering if there was any way, via T-SQL, to get the description of a database mirroring state from the state ID provided by $(WMI(State)) ?

The article I linked to provides a list of all the possible states and what they mean, so I could create my own table or use a CASE statement, but it would be nice if I could use built-in function or select from an existing table. Maybe my Google-Power is low today, but I've not been able to find anything.

Answer 1

To do this I ended up adding a CASE statement to my script - I could have created a table but this is more portable as I wanted to copy the script to several different servers.

declare @MirrorStateDesc varchar(50)
select @MirrorStateDesc = '$(ESCAPE_NONE(WMI(State)))'
select @MirrorStateDesc = CASE @MirrorStateDesc WHEN '7' THEN 'Manual Failover' WHEN '8' THEN 'Automatic Failover' WHEN '10' THEN 'No Quorum' WHEN '12' THEN 'Principle Running Exposed' ELSE @MirrorStateDesc  END

I'm only using this script on states 7, 8, 10 and 12 so they are the only ones I added to my case statement. The other values and descriptions are on the page I linked to in the question, if anybody wants to expand the script for their own uses.

I'm still surprised that there isn't a built in function to do this though!