I am not really sure what you are asking but I am going to guess (pretend?) that your question is: Is there a way in DBI to fetch a single value from a database without explicitly doing prepare, bind, execute, fetch, finish as single steps? And the answer is, yes!

my $dbh = DBI->connect(...);
my($max_foo) = $dbh->selectrow_array(q{
    SELECT MAX(foo) FROM bar
});
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