I agree wholeheartedly with the objective. Personally I tend to use stored procedures for all SQL interaction, and table driven database interaction with these stored procedures.

As long as the interface between the different parts stays constant underlying pieces can change without affecting the entire project (and in particular queries can be tuned without affecting application i.e. perl code).

The use of stored procedures is of course a portability problem, but the advantages afforded to the DBA are immense (and right now I wear a DBA hat, so... :-)

Michael