I'm not certain, but maybe the bit of the pod you remember reading is this bit

dbmopen HASH,DBNAME,MASK [This function has been largely superseded by the tie function.]

Perhaps that is the source of your confusion?

I think blokhead answered most of your concerns. All I would add is that (IMO) tie is Perls secret weapon.

Despite some concerns about the runtime overhead (which is no worse (I think) than calling OO-methods?), it provides a really easy-to-use mechanism with a simple, consistant interface for encapsulation of almost anything behind perls built-in data structures. This gives many of the benefits that OO-ists hold so dear without requiring each new module to invent and document a completely new interface--the bit that even experienced OO-ists get wrong so often. My only wish is that self-typing and nested-ties worked more intuatively.

I do hope that this simple and infinitely flexible mechanism for abstraction makes it into P6. Hopefully, the parrot engine will make reduce the runtime impact of magic.