Second, I disagree with dieing at any point in my programs and I look down on code which does that and forces me to try/catch/eval each of its calls instead of checking the error code that each function, IMO, should return

I'm familiar with this argument, and I wouldn't bother extending it except that in your own code above you wrote: 

# dies on error
sub   db_modify_column_value

[download]

So to some degree, you must see the benefit of not needing to check the return value of db_modify_column_value each time you call it.

For programs in C/C++ where exception handling can get messy and affects the performance (which is the whole reason for using C/C++) there's a decent reason to avoid exceptions and use return codes. There's also a perfect reason for using return codes on actions where failure is common or expected, and where a user will likely have a fall-back plan. But in code for everyday scripting where you expect it to work and the fall-back plan is basically "report the error as well as possible and give up", there's no reason not to use them. Using the ones that DBI provides for you saves you a ton of fingerwork and saves the person reading your code from eye strain.

BTW, you didn't check any return values of 'prepare' or whether iterating 'fetchrow_hashref' ended naturally or with an error (like the connection resetting). If you turn exceptions off, you need to add error checking *everywhere* or else you can end up with some really hard to diagnose bugs later on.

In reply to Re^4: SQL: Update column(s) value with extra WHERE by NERDVANA
in thread SQL: Update column(s) value with extra WHERE by bliako

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