Part of the messy structure is of course due to the fact that it is a cleanup.
The initialisation of the hash was done in the BEGIN section, I wanted to preserve the original structure, but apart from that, there is no real need and it can indeed be replaced by a subroutine call.
Difficult to say where such a cleaning effort should stop and hints on that would be most welcome too.
This is part of my BEGIN section, I left out part of the here document, as it is not instructive, but it is of course the source of the big hash:

#
# Intiliase global data and hint settings
# 
BEGIN
{
    %database_platforms = (
               "ora"    => "Oracle",
               "sql"    => "Sybase",
               "mss"    => "Mssql"
              );
    my %hints_setting = (
             "MODULE"   => \&set_object_module_hint,
             "TYPE"     => \&set_object_type_hint,
             "TEMPLATE" => \&set_object_template_hint
    );
    my $hints =  <<HINTS_DATA;
TYPE:unknown:f_ali_alb_init_profile.mss:procedure 
TYPE:unknown:f_ali_alb_init_profile.ora:procedure 
MODULE:unknown:v_state_dr.ora:misc   
HINTS_DATA
      
    my @hints = split /\n/, $hints;                    
                      
    foreach (@hints) {
             chomp;
             my @line = split /:/;
             my $proc = $hints_setting{ shift @line };
             &{$proc}( @line ) if ($proc);
    }
    
    $history_delimitertext = "--DO NOT CHANGE BELOW THIS LINE--LASTLOG
+=";
}
[download]

The (already exisitng) module set_object_module_hint goes as follows:

sub set_object_module_hint
{
    my ($project)    = $_[0];
    my ($objectname)    = $_[1];
    my ($modulename)    = lc ($_[2]);
    $modulename     =~s/\s//g;     
    my ($result);

    $result = 0;
    if ($modulename eq "misc") {

        if (exists $object_module_hints {$objectname}) {
            log_message "Overriding module hint '$modulename' for data
+base object name '$objectname'";
        }
        $object_module_hints {$objectname} = $modulename;
        $result = 1;

    } else {
      log_error "Invalid module hint '$modulename' for database object
+ name '$objectname'";
    }
    return $result;
}
[download]

The global variable is used in some places, but not too many, so I am inclined to follow your suggestion.

Tabari