Wrappers are there to keep your code clean and readable at the expense of performance. In general, the more the wrapper abstracts, the less efficient it is.

Sometimes you need extreme performance, and in that case raw DBI is the best solution.

Wrappers are simplified interfaces. That means that if you use a wrapper, some things may not be possible. But the things that are possible, will be much easier and require less code.

I made DBIx::Simple for people who don't mind cluttering their code with SQL queries. It can't be as fast as raw DBI, but it is much easier to use.

If you don't mind a huge performance hit, and you want to keep your code extremely clean, try Class::DBI. I've used it in several projects and really love it. Unfortunately, something that abstracts as much as this does, cannot be made much faster than it is.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }