[merb]

Well look at: https://golang.org/pkg/database/sql/#DB.Query

How likely is the error going to happen, if you know (through tests and everything) that the query is correct?

it can only happen in two scenarios:

1. the database has serious problems 2. the driver is incorrect

in normal cases you would probably handle that with a middleware in classical languages. i.e. you would have a middlewre that catches exceptions and handle the error there (logging, paging, whatever) and maybe show a nice looking "we are experience problems now"-page.

in golang this is a little bit harder, since you would need to handle the error by every caller and with the default http interface you would actually need to call your "handle default error" in every http handler.