I've been having similar ideas regarding DBI calls. One should be able to take a file full of SQL CREATE TABLEs and generate some of the more mundane DBI code (retrieving a row based on primary keys, for instance) programatically. I find it difficult to believe that nobody's tried to do this before, but I can't find any code to do it. Once writing the code generator becomes easier than grinding out the DBI stuff by hand (probably the next major DB project I work on), I'll hack something up.