Thanks Ovid - you've given me some great perl nuggets that helped really explain how to work object oriented coding in perl! I figured since this was so helpful to me, I'd post my code, fixed up, since you posted on this thread, maybe this can help someone else. (I personally am going to use this stuff for quick and dirty data cleanup tasks...)

You guys were right about reinventing the wheel, I'm sure there are much better modules out there that would be better for maintainability's sake - I just wanted to do this as an exercise and got exactly what I wanted!

Thanks again...

package db_dave;

use strict;
use DBI;
use vars qw/ @ISA /;
@ISA = qw/DBI/;

sub new
{
    my $class = shift;
    my ($db, $username, $password) = @_;

    if ($password eq "") {
        print STDOUT "## enter password for " . $username . "\@" . $db
+ . ": ";
        $password = <STDIN>;
        chomp $password;
        if ($password eq "") {die;}
    }

    my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:" . $db, $username, $password, 
+{ RaiseError => 1 }) || die "Cant' connect: $DBI::errstr";
    my $data = { _dbh => $dbh };
    bless $data, $class;
    print STDERR "\n## connected \n";
    return $data;
}

sub disconnect
{
    my ($self, $q, $err) = @_;
    my $dbh = $self->{ _dbh };    
    $dbh->disconnect;
    print STDERR "\n## disconnected \n\n";
    return;
}

sub runsql_string
{
    my ($self, $q, $err) = @_;
    my $dbh = $self->{ _dbh };
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare($q);
    print STDERR "\n## runsql_string: $q \n";    
    $sth->execute || die;
    my $returnstring;
    my @array;
    while (@array = $sth->fetchrow) { $returnstring = $array[0];}
    my $stringcount = @array;
    if ($stringcount > 1) { die; }
    $sth->finish;
    if ($::DEBUG) { print STDERR "[0] " . $returnstring . "\n"; }
    return $returnstring;
}


=begin testing

use strict;
use DBI;
use lib "./";
use db_dave;

$::DEBUG = "1"; # prints query results
my $dbh = new db_dave("foo", "foo", "foo");
my $err = "error";
$q = "select count(*) from table";
$dbh->runsql_string($q, $err) . "\n";
$dbh->disconnect;

=end testing
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-mr.dunstan