Ok, fair - I should have included the very next sentence in the quote as well, since OPs argument seems to be that missing records should NEVER cause exception:

Ok, fair - I should have included the very next sentence in the quote as well, since OPs argument seems to be that missing records should NEVER cause exception: >Anyone who expects a database to always have records and that the absence of a record is an "exception" has a very strange way of thinking. But pedantics aside, my point stands. There are absolutely contexts and code paths where a missing record is basically unrecoverable. Why bother returning an error to the local calling context when you know that code doesn't make sense anymore and can't recover? A jump to a new code path is the right call, and exceptions do that (with a lot of nice trace information about why we ended up on that new code path to boot). Doesn't mean a missing record should always result in an exception, but it's certainly not a "very strange way of thinking".