Funny, someone else asked a related question a little while ago, which led me to look up this post of mine from a few months ago.

It's a module that serves as a "wrapper" for DBI, which lets me do "use DbiFunc;" instead of "use DBI" in all the DB related scripting I do (using oracle on solaris for a wide range of distinct projects, table spaces, DB accounts).

In addition to solving the problem about keeping the account name/password/environment settings all in one place, it also provides a small number of easy-to-use (and easy-to-remember) methods that make the DB transactions a lot quicker to code, and cover virtually all the kinds of actions I typically need. I hope it gives a useful example of the approach, at least.