Regarding the automatic construction of the placeholder list when dealing with insertions:

    # ...
    my @fields = (qw(id name salary));
    my $fieldlist = join ", ", @fields;
    my $field_placeholders = join ", ", map {'?'} @fields;
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I personally prefer to avoid the map and play with the repetition operator:

    my field_placeholders = join ', ', ('?') x @fields;
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But I don't really know if this operator was available back in 2003 :)