How to retrieve database error from CodeIgniter

[eluser]Pascal Kriete[/eluser]
I seem to have misunderstood your first post. Drewsmiff is right of course. I don't know how many times my java programs have tossed null pointer exceptions back at me. Those things are evil.

So, to take another shot at your question. In most cases db errors will go to the exceptions class, so you can override that (see this bug). Another good practice with ajax requests is to have a timeout. Most of your users won't care what kind of error happened, so if the backend fails silently, you can toss them a 'server not responding' or something similar.