My understanding of the OP's question was that this wasn't a "soft failure" situation. This was an out-and-out "Bad Thing"™ kind of failure. Exceptions aren't for everyone - this is true. However, a recommended method of working with DBI is to use RaiseError and eval/$@ blocks.

The reason to defer to a function is that this method can now be used by multiple scripts / modules in multiple situations, providing the same handling in all installs for a given company. "Efficient" can mean multiple things. In my case, I look for efficiency in developer time. I am almost always less concerned with CPU/RAM efficiency¹, because they almost always cost less than the equivalent developer time.

1. Except, of course, in the pathological case where the tradeoff is grossly prejudiced against the hardware. It's a standard maximization problem that all first-year calculus students learn to solve.