Best way to approach object construction errors?

I've created a class called university, it has a constructor which can accept an id. If the id is sent during construction the constructor will connect to a MySQL db to set all of the objects member variables to the MySQl counterparts. I'd like to include some error notification so if I send it an id and let's say that record doesn't exist in the db I get some notification and can write a message out to log (or screen). But what is the best way to do this? Any recommendations? Tutorials? URLs? ~ Mike