...does not have that silly 'connect to the database' procedure,...

I'll second (or third or fourth) the motion for (DBI and) DBD::SQLite. Yes, you have to install the module, but it's not the sort of big database engine comparable to Oracle, Sybase, or even MySQL. And you do have to go through the motions of connecting to the database, but that is because it's accessible through the perl DBI module (after all, you have to tell DBD::SQLite where your database file is somehow), and DBI is the standard way to 'connect' to almost any SQL database. It should be an easy module to install, and IMHO SQLite is the reason that perl doesn't need anything like Gadfly (or at least there is very little need). There was some activity to make a pure perl database sometime ago, but it kind of died out, and SQLite fulfills most of the need for that sort of module.