[arielweisberg]

When I wrote some hobby code for Postgres using the PHP driver I had to manually check error codes after each and every operation. This came as no surprise to me.

Exception throwing database drivers are a relatively new thing not an old thing. The only thing MongoDB does differently is that the writes are fire and forget in that the database hasn't returned a response of any kind when the function returns.

In native code you can forget about using exceptions in a database driver because exception handling can be exceptionally broken on some platforms. SmartOS I am looking in your direction.

[alwold]

Exception throwing is not that new. It's just a question of what is the style in the language you're using. In Java, for example, throwing exceptions has been the norm since JDBC was invented in 1997. PHP is definitely different in that exceptions are rare. Same story with C++. I'm not super experienced with Ruby, but they seem pretty common there, so I would've expected to get one.