Thanks for the helful advice. At the moment, under time pressure, I don't grok the details of inflation, but I get the general idea.

It seems that with Class::DBI only numbers and strings can be passed into the DB.

Here's a follow up so that everyone knows what I did to fix the problem:

Oracle will by default turn a string into a date datatype based upon only its very strict idea of what a date string should be patterned like. I am using Oracle 8i, which will allow me to set the default date pattern for my session. I will do this so that I have a predictable pattern to make my strings. I do this in my Class::DBI setup like so:

  package CDNR::DBI;
  use base 'Class::DBI::Oracle';
  use Config::General;
  my %hostCF = ParseConfig("../mymodules/config.$hostname");

  CDNR::DBI->set_db('Main', $hostCF{'dbconnect'},
                             $hostCF{'dbname'},
                             $hostCF{'dbpw'});

  my $dbh = CDNR::DBI->db_Main;
  my $qs = "Alter session set nls_date_format = 'Mon-DD-YYYY'";
  $dbh->do($qs) or die "DB err alter date";
[download]

At this point I can pass a string to the Class::DBI for inserting into a "date" database field as longs as the string looks like Mon-DD-YYYY.

cheers