I agree, I've also only recently started trying Class:DBI, wonderful stuff. I ran into a few problems and asked a few questions here in the past week. In general, I think for most projects, one should not need to write SQL anymore. In java, I use Hibernate, I was thrilled when I got my first example to work, and throw away pretty much all the db layer I developed before. Class::DBI is even easier due to the dynamic nature of perl, you don't even need to write those getter/setters. Of course, if performance is an issue or your query becomes too complicated, go back to DBI.