when you are using xdebug, exceptions message will never be shown if you use any encoding different than UTF-8, so if you are using any database with translated messages like oracle, you should ALWAYS, always, throw a exception like this
throw new Exception(utf8_encode($message),$code), character like ã,é,ç, will make the exception message fail to be shown, if you are not using xdebug ( I do think you should at least try), this code will not affect your page.