Recently I've been playing around with a class wrapper for tables that is pretty close to what you want. At present it goes something like this:

package DBManager;

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;
use Date::Manip;
use Class::Singleton;

our @ISA = qw(Class::Singleton);

1;

sub _new_instance {
    my $type = shift;
    my $class = ref $type || $type;
    
    die "DBManager::instance must be invoked as DBManager->instance" i
+f ! defined $class;
    
    my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:databasefilename", "", "");

    die "Cannot connect to database: $DBI::errstr\n"
        unless defined $dbh;
        
    $dbh->{AutoCommit} = 0;
    $dbh->{RaiseError} = 1;

    return bless {dbh => $dbh}, $class;
}


sub DESTROY {
    my $self = shift;
    
    $self->{dbh}->disconnect () if defined $self->{dbh};
}


package DBObject;

require Exporter;
our @ISA = ('Exporter');

our @EXPORT = qw(new);

sub new {
    my ($class, %params) = @_;

    die "DBObject::new must be invoked as DBObject->new"
        unless defined $class;

    die "A table definition (tableDef => ['name', 'column info'] is re
+quired by $class->new ()"
        unless 'ARRAY' eq ref $params{tableDef};

    die "database handle must be from a DBManager derived object"
        if exists $params{db} and ! $params{db}->isa ('DBManager');

    my $self = bless {%params}, $class;
    my %cols = map {s/^\s*//; s/\s*$//; /(\w+)\s*(.*)/; $1 => $2}
        split /,/, $params{tableDef}[1];

    $self->{cols} = \%cols;    
    $self->setDbh ();
    
    return $self;
}


sub DESTROY {
    my $self = shift;
    
    $self->{db} = undef;
}
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1;


package Group;

use base 'DBObject';
require Exporter;
our @ISA = ('DBObject');
our @EXPORT = qw( );

my $groupTableDef = ['groups',
     'id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL,
     groupid INTEGER NOT NULL,
     user INTEGER NOT NULL'
    ];


sub new {
    my ($class, %params) = @_;
    
    $params{tableDef} = $groupTableDef unless exists $params {tableDef
+};
    return $class->SUPER::new (%params);
}

1;
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It would be pretty easy to add columns to the table definition in derived classes rather than expecting the most derived class to supply the whole thing, although I've not had a need for that yet so it's not done that way.

Given that Task is derived from DBObject with a 'starts' column you can do stuff like:

    my $task = Task->new;
    my $now = Date::Manip::ParseDate ('today');
    my $tasks = $task->fetch_all (starts => ["<= '$now'"]);
    my @readyTasks =
        sort {$a->{starts} cmp $b->{starts}} values %$tasks;
[download]