Turning query errors to Exceptions in MySQLi

I went ahead and ran a test where one query uses a prepared statement, and the other builds the entire query then executes that. I'm probably not making what I'm wanting to know easy to understand.

Here's my test code. I was thinking prepared statements sort of held back execution until a $stmt->close() was called to optimize it or something. That doesn't appear to be the case though as the test that builds the query using real_escape_string is at least 10 times faster.

<?php

$db = new mysqli('localhost', 'user', 'pass', 'test');

$start = microtime(true);
$a = 'a';
$b = 'b';

$sql = $db->prepare('INSERT INTO multi (a,b) VALUES(?, ?)');
$sql->bind_param('ss', $a, $b);
for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
{
    $a = chr($i % 1);
    $b = chr($i % 2);
    $sql->execute();
}
$sql->close();

echo microtime(true) - $start;

$db->close();

?>

You need to retrieve a mysqli_result object first, with something like...

$res = $stmt->get_result();

... then fetch the number of rows from this object (not $stmt):

$numrows = mysqli_num_rows($res);

UPDATE: get_result method is available in PHP 5.3+ only, for the older versions one should use the following approach:

// $stmt preparing code goes here...

$stmt->execute();
$stmt->store_result();
$num_rows = $stmt->num_rows;
doSomethingWith($num_rows);

// processing cycle:
$stmt->bind_result($some_param, $another_param);
while ($stmt->fetch()) {
   doSomethingElseWith($some_param, $another_param);
}
$stmt->free_result();
$stmt->close();

As a sidenote, two recommendations: 1) it'd be probably faster to use a single query here and look for value both in TeacherAlias and TeacherUsername fields simultaneously (with OR operator, like TeacherAlias = ? OR TeacherUsername = ?); 2) it'd be easier to work with explicitly stated columns (SELECT id, TeacherAlias AS alias, TeacherUsername AS username...) instead of just (SELECT *) in your query.