In general, I try to validate data as soon as possible after it has been entered. This is so that I can give helpful messages to the user earlier than after they have clicked "submit" or the equivalent.
By the time that it comes to making the db call I am hopefull that the data I am passing should be fairly good.
I try to keep db calls in the one file (or group of files) that share helper methods make it as easy as possible for the programmer (me or whoever else adds calls) to write to a log details about the exception, and what parameters were passed in etc
