Yes, the try/catch block is better if the catch block can handle exceptions for all its descendants. As always in programming YMMV and this is sometimes true an

Yes, the try/catch block is better if the catch block can handle exceptions for all its descendants. As always in programming YMMV and this is sometimes true and sometimes it is not and when it is not it is better not to throw an exception. I agree that a database API should not itself throw an error if an empty result set is found. It may throw an error if there is an SQL error, though, and really should. When one gets an empty result set where this should not happen, for instance because a row was just inserted and one is in a transaction, the user code could throw an exception instead. Making exceptions optional is something that I have indeed done in the past because some uses of the code could benefit from exceptions while other uses did not so much.