Can a procedure in Oracle return a result set? If so, it would seem that you're forced to deal with those results being returned in an array. Seems a bit heavy handed given that the DBI provides many faster ways to return results. Moreover, all rows will be squashed together...how do you know where one row stops and the next starts? Also, the calling of a procedure vs the calling of a function seems rather arbitrary. Is there some way to perhaps distinguish the two at run time? Perhaps inside of an eval? (i.e. try the name of the function as a stored procedure first...if it fails because it doesn't exist, then try it as a function) Other than that...cool idea. :) Update I forgot to mention...in your __run_procedure sub, you do croak "blah" unless ref $dbh. Your check will fail to detect an error if I call it like-a-so: sysdate(\1). It's not enough to check that $dbh is a reference...it has to be the right kind of reference.