Not to be insensitive to your perceived ideas, but initially the DBI wasn't designed for MySQL. As great as MySQL is (or so I've heard), the DBI was designed in a much similar fashion as ODBC, in the sense that someone obviously needed a standard Perl interface. True it's still sensitive to the underlying DBMS SQL version, but that gives it some nice power over ODBC since you can actually write optimized SQL. My point is, you've got some strange facts, since I constantly see posts on the dbi-users mailing list, mostly from the DBD authors, and since I was fully unaware of Tim Bunce's involvement with mSQL-MySQL DBD development. I would imagine that if he was needing the mSQL and MySQL DBD, he would have written that one first. And finally, I doubt O'Reilly (with their finger on the ever constant pulse of developers), would have decided to so recently publish a book on it if it was going to die so quickly. Unlike other book publishers, I've rarely ever seen a book come out from them about the newest hot thing until they had a chance to actually research the subject and provide a useful resource. ALL HAIL BRAK!!!