in reply to Cross platform commonality with the Perl DBI

I think your real challenge will lie not is making it cross database, but in keeping the performance up to snuff and doing that at the same time. Most people think in terms of feature issues when they think of porting, but as a performance analyst of sorts I see the other side of the coin. When I work with some of these e-application platforms and ERP (Vignette, BEA, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.), they all put high value on their DB independence. But every one of them pays a price on the performance side. Either they have huge routines to go through to optimize for each DB and then do checks to see which one it is; or they end up writing such generic SQL that it does not take advantage of any of the optimizations that these DBs make available in order to perform really well.

The moral here is to be aware of performance considerations as you go forward and try and be DB independent. Remember too that people will bend from need and if what you're doing provides enough value to them, they will support the DB you design and optimize for because they need what you are doing.

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play." --Nietzsche