php - PDO try-catch usage in functions

Question

I'm thinking of using PDO in all of my future webapp. Currently (using what I've learned from SO so far), what I have in my site to handle database connection is a Singleton class like this :

class DB {

    private static $instance = NULL;
    private static $dsn      = "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase;";
    private static $db_user  = 'root';
    private static $db_pass  = '0O0ooIl1';

    private function __construct() 
    {

    }
    private function __clone()
    {

    }   
    public static function getInstance() {

        if (!self::$instance)
        {           
            self::$instance = new PDO(self::$dsn, self::$db_user, self::$db_pass);
            self::$instance-> setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
        }
        return self::$instance;
    }
}

and another file (functions.php) with content-specific functions looking exactly like this one :

function get_recent_activities ()
{    
    try
    {    
        $db = DB::getInstance();
        // --prepare and execute query here, fetch the result--
        return $my_list_of_recent_activities;
    }
    catch (PDOException $e)
    {
        return "some fail-messages";
    }
}
...

meaning that I have to repeat the try .. catch part in all of the functions.

My questions are :

1. How should I make that more efficient ? (eg. not having to repeat try..catch in all functions, and yet still able to return different "fail-message" on each one)
2. Is this already a good practice ? I'm still new at PDO and OOP (still a lot more to learn), so (as of now), I can't really see any disadvantages or things that can be improved in there.

I'm sorry if that seems unclear or too long. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Your implementation is just fine, and it'll work perfectly well for most purposes.

It's not necessary to put every query inside a try/catch block, and in fact in most cases you actually don't want to. The reason for this is that if a query generates an exception, it's the result of a fatal problem like a syntax error or a database issue, and those are not issues that you should be accounting for with every query that you do.

For example:

try {
    $rs = $db->prepare('SELECT * FROM foo');
    $rs->execute();
    $foo = $rs->fetchAll();
} catch (Exception $e) {
    die("Oh noes! There's an error in the query!");
}

The query here will either work properly or not work at all. The circumstances where it wouldn't work at all should not ever occur with any regularity on a production system, so they're not conditions that you should check for here. Doing so is actually counterproductive, because your users get an error that will never change, and you don't get an exception message that would alert you to the problem.

Instead, just write this:

$rs = $db->prepare('SELECT * FROM foo');
$rs->execute();
$foo = $rs->fetchAll();

In general, the only time that you'll want to catch and handle a query exception is when you want to do something else if the query fails. For example:

// We're handling a file upload here.
try {
    $rs = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO files (fileID, filename) VALUES (?, ?)');
    $rs->execute(array(1234, '/var/tmp/file1234.txt'));
} catch (Exception $e) {
    unlink('/var/tmp/file1234.txt');
    throw $e;
}

You'll want to write a simple exception handler that logs or notifies you of database errors that occur in your production environment and displays a friendly error message to your users instead of the exception trace. See http://www.php.net/set-exception-handler for information on how to do that.