AgentM's opinion is in the minority. While he raises valid points, it's no reason to avoid DBI. Tim Bunce admits there are things that would have been designed differently if he had started with the knowledge he has now, but that's true for any large project, and should be no reason to scare you away from the code. (Witness Perl - the reexamination of items that have been deprecated is leading us to redesign some of the internals and a bit of the externals for Perl 6.)

On the whole, DBI and the numerous DBDs provide one of the best cross-platform database interface solutions in any language, giving Perl a nice edge when talking about persistent store in comparison to Java or C++.

An uncountably large number of e-commerce sites use DBI for mission-critical applications. There's no chance it'll be going into "unmaintained" state any time soon. The mailing list for DBI gets about 30 to 50 messages a day.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker