try-catch every db connection?

Question

Is it recommended to put a try-catch block in every function that opens a DB connection and log the error there, or should I rather catch errors in a higher layer of the application?

public static Category GetCategoryByName(string name)
{
    Category result;
    try
    {
        using (IDbConnection conn = ConnectionHelper.CreateDbConnectionByName(_connectionStringName))
        {
            conn.Open();
            using (IDbCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand())
            {
                //do stuff
            }
        }
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
         // log error here?
    }
    return result;
}

or rather

try
{
    Category myCat = DataTools.GetCategoryByName("myCat");
    // other stuff
}
catch(Exception e)
{
   // log error here?
}

To sum it up: Should errors be caught as early as possible in the code? Or should I rather catch them where I have more information about the context?

Answer 1

As always, it depends, but in general, only catch an exception if you can do something about it, or you have specific code (e.g. a retry) to happen, or if you wish to take a very general exception and wrap it into an exception that is more specific for your business logic, otherwise, let the exception bubble up and the top most layer can log it/deal with it in a centralised fashion.

Any other way results in a lot of logging code interspersed with all the business logic.