This is how it should be done, I'm such a fan of this page: https://www.psycopg.org/docs/errors.html https://www.psycopg.org/docs/errors.html Edit: by "this" I

This is how it should be done, I'm such a fan of this page: https://www.psycopg.org/docs/errors.html https://www.psycopg.org/docs/errors.html Edit: by "this" I meant to agree with parent: Getting a useful, well defined exception is how it should be done. Psycopg2 does this very well.