In my experience, all such "query tools" do is make you fight them. It's much better if you learn SQL and write your SQL directly.

If you look at the section "WHERE clauses as hashrefs", you find how this flavour of query language is specified. It doesn't seem to allow for the "OR" operator, which is OK given its limited scope.

But as database basically returns a DBI database handle, you can run your own SQL directly. If you use placeholders, you should be fine.