jonadab, it sounds like you really need to look into Class::DBI or some other interface to the DBI. Your first two items and the last one are managed by Class::DBI automatically.

As for the third suggestion, RDBMS table design is not all about auto incremented numeric primary keys. There are many cases where a string works better as the primary key, for instance. I would suggest a good RDBMS tutorial, but I haven't found any good ones :)

Ted