There are two sides to learning database programming.

One side concerns database design. Google for database normal form for some of the many treatments of making a db maintainable, efficient, and no bigger than necessary.

The other side is learning SQL. It is an oddity of a language to many. It has a strong component of functional programming, but without any of the elegance.

The third half, of course, is to learn DBI.pm. That may as well be the first half ;-)

After Compline,
Zaxo