I used to be proud of [the subquery emulation feature], because it enabled users of MySQL to use subqueries and a lot of people seemed to really want that. But MySQL now supports that natively and thus of course in a much better way. And I don't want to maintain the ugly code needed for it just for database drivers that aren't used much anyway.

Just for another viewpoint, I've not used DBIx::Simple, but your original post prompted me to skim the docs. The only thing there that seemed of possible interest to me was this feature - my work application targets MySQL v3, and while the next generation of the application will target a later version it is unlikely that the current generation will be re-targeted.

I've occasionally been hurt by the lack of subselects, and considered emulating them; discovering that someone has already done that was a pleasant surprise.

If it works, I'd suggest keeping it - don't expect MySQL v3 to disappear from production servers any time soon. (In fact, a quick check on http://www.mysql.com suggests that the subselects are in v4.1, while latest stable release is still at 4.0.20.)

Hugo