[nicksardo]

I disagree with most of what you said.

"exception oriented" programming is dirty. It's especially filthy when your expecting exceptions from a database for these reasons

a) Returning errors to the user is asking for a slipup handling the different exceptions, thus returning more info than desired. Cue the injection hacks!

b) Depending on the DBMS and its configuration, an upsert destined to fail may block reads and other writes from executing!

I had a feeling somebody would gripe about duplicated validation rules; it's a problem that needs an elogant solution on your own stack.