If your project is large and might be running for a while, you should wrap all the different calls to the database in separate functions even if you've got a nice generalized interface. You will eventually have to make some workarounds or sanity checking on the data before using them, and it's thankful to have that located one place.

I think this is why I'm leaning toward having the many function names, even if using the factored function for the basic inserts, as tadman or flounder99 suggested. This is a mod_perl application, so there's got to be some good data checks somewhere.

I also don't like the look of a bunch of calls like:

getByFieldval("sometable", "somecolumn",$value1);
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all over the place. I have trouble remembering the table names and column names... Shouldn't various layers of the application be somewhat insulated from one another? Data encapsulation and all that... :)