Everything is working fine, but I can't help but stare at the lengths I have to go through when I want to get a single value from the database.

If four statements strikes you as being a great length, then hide the length by wraping it up in a subroutine.

  sub the_name {
      my $id = shift;
      my $sth = $db->prepare("select the_name from table where id = ?"
+);
      $sth->execute($id);
      my ($the_name) = $sth->fetchrow_array();
      $sth->finish();
      return $the_name;
  }
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then, you get the simplicity of   print the_name(3);