How so? You've basically turned my TRY block into a function and deferred the failure handling through an exception. That doesn't seem more efficient to me — am I missing something?

I don't particularly like exceptions as a mechanism to deal with soft failures though. In case I did need to handle multiple cases, I'd do something much along the lines of my first post, like this:

OPTION_LIST: for(
    [ \%hash1, \@options1, \&do_something1, ],
    [ \%hash2, \@options2, \&do_something2, ],
    [ \%hash3, \@options3, \&do_something3, ],
) {
    my ( $hash, $options, $callback ) = @$_;
    foreach my $try ( @$options ) {
        next unless exists $hash->{ $try };
        $callback->( $try );
        next OPTION_LIST;
    }
    log_failure();
    last;
}
[download]

Note that both this and your code is deficient if you need atomic behaviour; do_something1 will already have been called by the time a failure to find any of the @options2 in %hash2 is detected. If that is undesired, a proper exception-based solution will hardly differ from the non-exception solution.

My understanding of the OP's question was that this wasn't a "soft failure" situation. This was an out-and-out "Bad Thing"™ kind of failure. Exceptions aren't for everyone - this is true. However, a recommended method of working with DBI is to use RaiseError and eval/$@ blocks.

The reason to defer to a function is that this method can now be used by multiple scripts / modules in multiple situations, providing the same handling in all installs for a given company. "Efficient" can mean multiple things. In my case, I look for efficiency in developer time. I am almost always less concerned with CPU/RAM efficiency¹, because they almost always cost less than the equivalent developer time.

1. Except, of course, in the pathological case where the tradeoff is grossly prejudiced against the hardware. It's a standard maximization problem that all first-year calculus students learn to solve.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Then there are Damian modules.... *sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon. - flyingmoose

I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested