That comment doesn't refer to Perl objects in general.

It's talking about the inflation that turns the raw database data into an object, mostly has_a relations. See the CDBI docs and code.

Examples:

You store the id field of another row in some other table and it inflates to another CDBI object representing that row. (Normal has_a)

You have a Storable serialized object stored in a string column in the database. "inflate" deserializes it.