I LOVE PERL! However, if you value your job, you will step a bit further from the problem and try to find a good tool that will meet the needs of top management. There are several good OLAP tools used on data warehousing projects that can greatly simplify reporting if only you can develop datafeeds to their "cube" data model. Yes, it costs some money, but if there is a huge need for complex reports done quickly, OLAP is a good option. Hacking it out yourself is both time consuming and counterproductive (assuming you don't go to the trouble of building Perl modules and stored procedures). The maintenance of lots of hacked stuff gets overwhelming very quickly. Assuming you can't buy any tools, I suggest that at very least, you design Perl modules to control the interface to small groups of related tables. Your cgi code will be greatly simplified and your design process will be smoother. What works for me is to first design the tables, then design the interface .pm's and then to build the code that uses the .pm's. That's just my opinion and I am very opinionated. So there.