Find if an SQLException was thrown because of a duplicate

Question

I have a Java program that is agnostic from the database and I need to know, while inserting, if an SQLException was thrown because of a duplicate key.

If I was using a

Answer 1

I think the ideal solution would be to have the data layer throw a specific exception in this case, perhaps a subclass of SQLException for DuplicateKeyException or something similar.

If you want to be able to treat different exceptions differently, then you have to throw different exception types (or sub-types) to begin with.

I think this is an area where the Spring Framework gets things really right: they provide a very rich hierarchy of "database exceptions" all of which extend DataAccessException , with sub-trees of types for "recoverable exceptions", "transient exceptions", "data integrity exceptions", etc etc. This leaves your client code free to catch any (or none) of the exception types which it can handle or care about: exceptions that indicate an error that may not be repeatable if you re-run the transaction, a fatal non-recoverable error, or you can simply catch the root type.