I agree completely.

chromatic wrote a nice article in defense of DBI a while ago for Perl.com, which is a useful starting point for any kind of abstraction.

Then you take another step and do to SQL in Perl what you'd do to HTML in Perl: push it out to templates. And there you go.

Actually, an added benefit of this approach is that you have total control over the SQL in use; you can hand off your templates to a DBA or whoever and they can tune them for you. That's not something you can usually do with autogenerated SQL.

Makeshifts last the longest.