Thanks, Ryszard. I agree at including $! could be more useful, even to an end-user. (I'm curious as to how most monks go about combining a user-friendly error message with the sometimes less friendly $! version.)

Although I don't think this is a good application for putting the SQL in a separate file, it is definitely something I will think about for future projects.

The obscured password is not for strict security; it's to prevent someone who looks over my shoulder, or to whom I show the code, from having the password burned into their brain accidentally.

I like your idea of using a constant for variables like $booth_table that don't change (though I understand that perl optimizes for cases like this anyway, and it does make interpolation more complex). And I think logging would be perfect for this particular application, which often results in large changes in data.

I think you're also dead-on about catching my DBI errors. Although I'm using RaiseError, it could use more user-friendly error-reporting/handling.

Impossible Robot