I don't know how Tie::DBI handles quoting, but I'll assume it does. I don't see anything immediately wrong, so I would try an insert with the normal DBI module:

use POSIX qw(strftime);
my $now_string = strftime "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", localtime;

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:foothills', 'root', '') or die;
my $sth = $dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO users values('test', 'test', 1, 1
+, 1, 1, ?)");
$sth->execute($now_string);
$dbh->disconnect();
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You may want to make better fake values than I've used -- I just created a new table with a single datetime column.

If that insert works, the problem's probably somewhere in Tie::DBI. Yuck.

Update: The problem *is* in Tie::DBI, specifically within the _fields() method. It checks the allowed column names from the database, then issues the statement:

my %fields = map { lc($_)=>1 } @{$sth->{NAME}};

The lc there is the trouble.

If you add WARN => 1 to the tie statement, you'll get a warning about an unknown field named 'dateCreated' in the initialization line.

The solution is either to remove the lc() from Tie::DBI, or to use lowercase keys in the anonymous hash. Perhaps some databases don't support mixed case in field names, so Dr. Stein thought he would be safer than sorry.