I got a little ways into DBIx::Class which is nice for getting up and running quickly using the dbicdump command from DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader. It's very good at giving you a single table select (Dave Cross has some notes on getting your head around resultSets), but joining 4 tables without primary and foreign key relations ($work is fsck'd) will send you back to SQL.

Really depends on your use case.