In addition to the other comments you've received and to answer your question, yes, named placeholders are supported by DBD::Oracle and I'd say they are good practise so long as you are only using DBD::Oracle. You can use a string preceded by a colon to name each parameter in the SQL. DBD::Oracle even supports (as you have found) binding a named placeholder once but referring to it multiple times in the SQL. However, you should note that although most DBDs support named placeholders not all of them support using the named placeholder more than once in the SQL (e.g., DBD::ODBC - patches welcome)