I've heard Class::DBI described as many things before... but never "complex whirlygig" :-)

(SPOPS or Alzabo on the other hand ;-)

update: above removed because I was foolish and misread the message hierarchy. Bad Adrian.

For example, to create the rows (assuming the DB table exists) you would just need something like (untested code):

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

package BackupJob;
use base 'Class::DBI';
use CLASS;

# the DB where you job table is
CLASS->set_db('Main', 'dbi:mysql', 'username', 'password');

# the name of your job table
CLASS->table('jobs');

# the columns in your table, primary key first
CLASS->columns(All => qw(
    jobid 
    class classtype client compression elapsed ended filelistcount 
    files fileslastwritten group jobid jobpid jobtype kbytes 
    kbyteslastwritten masterserver operation owner path percent 
    priority retentionperiod retentionunits schedule schedule_type 
    server started state status stunit subtype try 
    try_1_elapsed try_1_ended try_1_fileswritten try_1_kbyteswritten 
    try_1_pid try_1_server try_1_started try_1_status try_1_statuscoun
+t 
    try_1_statusdescription try_1_statuslines try_1_stunit trycount
));


package main;

# If we assume %JOBS us a has mapping
# jobid => {column => value, column => value ...} 
# then the following will create a DB row for each
# entry

my ($jobid, $values);
while ( ($jobid, $values) = each %JOBS ) {
    BackupJob->create({ jobid => $jobid, %$values }) or die 
};
[download]

The BackupJob object also gives you lots of other nice things like searching, accessors, etc for free. Nice Class::DBI :-)

(of course, one of the things that Class::DBI doesn't support is tables with multi-column primary keys - so its not a lot of use for the table example I gave earlier :-)

I was not replying to your post.

If the poster is new to working with databases, then the best thing to do is to get comfortable with the most straitforward way of doing things, which is with SQL. Not a good idea to abstract out fundamental tools if you don't know how the fundamental tools work.

()-()
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  `                                                     

Apologies for the misrepresentation. Misread the message hierarchy. Now fixed.

You can certainly get in a horrible fix if you don't understand that tools like Class::DBI have limitations (the lack of support for multi-column primary keys being a case in point here).

I think I could argue with the statement that SQL is the most straightforward way of doing the task - but I understand the sentiment ;-)