I usually create a library class for this kind of work. I used to put the code in the object of the kind of data I was pulling, but I figured a library would be more maintainable. For example:

my @users = Project::getUsers();

So that function returns an array of User objects. If you allow your constructor of your User object to take array references as an arg, you can populate the object on the fly with the result row, and then return the list of objects.

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perl: code of the samurai